KromHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections with Kronecker-Product Residual Matrices

Abstract: The success of Hyper-Connections (HC) in neural networks (NN) has also highlighted issues related to its training instability and restricted scalability. The Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) mitigate these challenges by projecting the residual connection space onto a Birkhoff polytope, however, it faces two issues: 1) its iterative Sinkhorn-Knopp (SK) algorithm does not always yield exact doubly stochastic residual matrices; 2) mHC incurs a prohibitive $\mathcal{O}(n^3C)$ parameter complexity with $n$ as the width of the residual stream and $C$ as the feature dimension. The recently proposed mHC-lite reparametrizes the residual matrix via the Birkhoff-von-Neumann theorem to guarantee double stochasticity, but also faces a factorial explosion in its parameter complexity, $\mathcal{O} \left( nC \cdot n! \right)$. To address both challenges, we propose \textbf{KromHC}, which uses the \underline{Kro}necker products of smaller doubly stochastic matrices to parametrize the residual matrix in \underline{mHC}. By enforcing manifold constraints across the factor residual matrices along each mode of the tensorized residual stream, KromHC guarantees exact double stochasticity of the residual matrices while reducing parameter complexity to $\mathcal{O}(n^2C)$. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that KromHC matches or even outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) mHC variants, while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters. The code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/wz1119/KromHC}.