Geometry-aware Distance Measure for Diverse Hierarchical Structures in Hyperbolic Spaces

Learning in hyperbolic spaces has attracted increasing attention due to its superior ability to model hierarchical structures of data. Most existing hyperbolic learning methods use fixed distance measures for all data, assuming a uniform hierarchy across all data points. However, real-world hierarchical structures exhibit significant diversity, making this assumption overly restrictive. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware distance measure in hyperbolic spaces, which dynamically adapts to varying hierarchical structures. Our approach derives the distance measure by generating tailored projections and curvatures for each pair of data points, effectively mapping them to an appropriate hyperbolic space. We introduce a revised low-rank decomposition scheme and a hard-pair mining mechanism to mitigate the computational cost of pair-wise distance computation without compromising accuracy. We present an upper bound on the low-rank approximation error using Talagrand's concentration inequality, ensuring theoretical robustness. Extensive experiments on standard image classification (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100), hierarchical classification (5-level CIFAR-100), and few-shot learning tasks (mini-ImageNet, tiered-ImageNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our approach consistently outperforms learning methods that use fixed distance measures, with notable improvements on few-shot learning tasks, where it achieves over 5\% gains on mini-ImageNet. The results reveal that adaptive distance measures better capture diverse hierarchical structures, with visualization showing clearer class boundaries and improved prototype separation in hyperbolic spaces.

Pengxiang Li, Yuwei Wu, Zhi Gao, Xiaomeng Fan, Wei Wu, Zhipeng Lu, Yunde Jia, Mehrtash Harandi · 2025