After the Euclidean Highway: Hyperbolic Expert AI as the Next Innovation

Whether a hyperbolic representation model uses its geometry cannot be inferred from curvature alone: what matters is the dimensionless operating point $\sqrt{c}ρ$ and whether the radial and cone mechanisms are operational there. We develop necessary-condition diagnostics and audit three published hyperbolic vision-language families -- MERU, HyCoCLIP, and PHyCLIP -- across released checkpoints and matched interventions. All converged checkpoints remain near-Euclidean ($H(u)\approx1$; none reaches $\sqrt{c}ρ>1$), and releasing the curvature floor changes $c$ and norms without leaving this regime or substantially degrading downstream performance. Entailment cones are inactive or saturated, and graded traversal fails under controlled readouts, including the models' native distance metrics. External parent-child ordering shows no shuffle-controlled pair-specific radial signal at quantified sensitivity; the only surviving pair-specific signal, a statistically detectable but small residual on the GRIT box-to-full-caption relation, remains non-operative under the evaluated readouts. Taxonomy correlations show no detectable norm contribution beyond cosine, and coarse-retrieval gains co-vary with box/compositional supervision without establishing an active radial mechanism. Gradient diagnostics expose a low-curvature, wide-cone shortcut in the entailment objective. A closed-form aperture identity places the saturation edge at $\sqrt{c}ρ\le2K$: with the floor released, all trained relation-level parent means lie at or below this edge, leaving the parent cones fully or nearly saturated. Entailment-off runs pass the edge and continue contracting. The shortcut is the dominant accelerator of collapse, not its sole cause. These audited formulations do not show an operative radial/cone mechanism under our diagnostics. We distill the audit into a five-number geometry report for hierarchy claims.

We present hyperbolix, an open-source library for hyperbolic deep learning in JAX, built on Flax NNX. To our knowledge, it is the first comprehensive, general-purpose hyperbolic deep learning library in JAX. It includes six manifolds with a common interface: Euclidean space, the Poincaré ball, the hyperboloid, the $κ$-stereographic model, mixed-curvature product spaces, and the proper velocity space. We implement layer families that cover linear layers, convolutions, attention, normalization, positional encoding, regression, and vector quantization. These building blocks span methods ranging from Ganea's original hyperbolic neural networks to recent fully hyperbolic architectures such as Hypformer and Lorentzian ResNet. Additionally, hyperbolix contains Riemannian optimizers implemented as optax transformations, wrapped distributions, and hyperbolic dimensionality-reduction techniques. Its API uses idiomatic JAX: Manifolds are stateless, with curvature being passed at call time, while manifold operations act on single points, with jax.vmap enabling batch operations. The precision of every checked operation is tested against a closed-form NumPy/SciPy transcription from the source paper or a finite difference, for both float32 and float64. On the hyperboloid, standard formulas for two-point operations, such as the distance, lose precision far from the origin, because they subtract two large, nearly equal terms. hyperbolix replaces these subtractions with cancellation-free formulas that stay accurate in float32 at distances where prior implementations return NaN. hyperbolix is available under the MIT license at https://github.com/timoklein/hyperbolix .

Extending a fully post-trained language model with new domain capabilities is fundamentally limited by monolithic training paradigms: retraining from scratch is expensive and scales poorly, while continued training often degrades existing capabilities. We present BAR (Branch-Adapt-Route), which trains independent domain experts, each through its own mid-training, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning pipeline, and composes them via a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with lightweight router training. Unlike retraining approaches that mix all domains and require full reprocessing for any update (with cost scaling quadratically), BAR enables updating individual experts independently with linear cost scaling and no degradation to existing domains. At the 7B scale, with experts for math, code, tool use, and safety, BAR achieves an overall score of 49.1 (averaged across 7 evaluation categories), matching or exceeding re-training baselines (47.8 without mid-training, 50.5 with). We further show that modular training provides a structural advantage: by isolating each domain, it avoids the catastrophic forgetting that occurs when late-stage RL degrades capabilities from earlier training stages, while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of updating or adding a domain. Together, these results suggest that decoupled, expert-based training is a scalable alternative to monolithic retraining for extending language models.