A General Kernel Framework for Non-CND Distance Measures Using |D|-Dimensional Sparse Landmark Embeddings

The Gaussian kernel is a widely used similarity measure underlying kernel methods such as kernel PCA and spectral clustering, but computing Gaussian kernel distances for many pairs of points can be expensive. Using Random Fourier Features (RFF), Chen and Phillips [ALT 2017] showed that for points in a $d$-dimensional Euclidean ball in ${\mathbb R}^N$, $t=Ω((d/\varepsilon^2)\log(dR/\varepsilon))$ features suffice to preserve all pairwise Gaussian kernel distances within a $(1\pm\varepsilon)$ factor with high probability. We establish a uniform relative-error embedding theorem for the more general setting of an arbitrary positive-reach submanifold $\mathcal M\subset{\mathbb R}^N$ of intrinsic dimension $d$. We show that $t=O((d/\varepsilon^2)\log(\operatorname{vol}(\mathcal M)^2N^{2d}/(\operatorname{vol}(B_1^d(0))^2\operatorname{rch}(\mathcal M)^{2d}\varepsilon^{2d+1}δ)))$, or approximately $O((d^2/\varepsilon^2)(\log N+\log(1/(\varepsilonδ))))$, RFFs suffice, with probability $1-δ$, to preserve the Gaussian kernel distance between every pair of manifold points up to relative error $\varepsilon$. Thus the bound depends only logarithmically on the ambient dimension and on manifold parameters such as volume and reach, while retaining the $1/\varepsilon^2$ Euclidean rate. We also prove a topological consequence: under the same RFF embedding, persistent homology is preserved in the sense that weighted Cech and Rips filtrations built from Gaussian kernel power distance are $(1\pm\varepsilon_\star)$-interleaved, where $\varepsilon_\star$ accounts for both distance distortion and kernel-weight approximation.

A fundamental open question in self-supervised learning (SSL) is the explicit characterization of the optimal geometry of the learned representations. Recently, LeJEPA identified isotropic Gaussian embeddings as optimal for minimizing downstream prediction risk in Euclidean spaces. However, the corresponding problem for distributions supported on lower-dimensional manifolds, such as the hypersphere, remains unexplored. In this work, we demonstrate that extending this minimax analysis to smooth distributions on Riemannian manifolds fundamentally changes the optimal solution. We show that, under a worst-case formulation, both k-nearest neighbors and kernel ridge regression induce hyperspherical uniformity. More precisely, we show that uniform distributions on manifolds are optimal for k-nearest neighbors, and that the uniform distribution on the sphere is optimal for kernel ridge regression with both the exponential dot-product kernel and the linear kernel. This theoretical insight reveals a fundamental limitation of Gaussian embeddings: their non-uniform density induces anisotropic k-NN neighborhoods, severely biasing the estimator. To correct this, we introduce SPHERE-JEPA, a theoretically grounded SSL framework. We adapt LeJEPA's Cram{é}r-Wold projection mechanism to enforce hyperspherical uniformity rather than a Gaussian prior. Empirically, SPHERE-JEPA yields significant improvements, boosting texture retrieval mAP by over 6%, while consistently matching or outperforming LeJEPA on standard benchmarks-including a +1.8% linear probing gain on ImageNet-1K (ViT-B/14).

We study query time bounds for the fundamental problem of estimating the kernel mean $\frac1{|X|}\sum_{x\in X}\mathbf{k}(x,y)$ of a query $y$ in a finite dataset $X\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ up to a prescribed additive error $\varepsilon$. The best known bounds for the Gaussian kernel are $O(d/\varepsilon^2)$, $\widetilde O(d+1/\varepsilon^4)$, and $\widetilde O(d+Δ^2/\varepsilon^2)$, where $Δ$ is the diameter of a region containing the points. We prove the new bound $\tilde O(d+\varepsilonΔ^2+1/\varepsilon^3)$, which improves over the previous ones in regimes with small error $\varepsilon$ and intermediate diameter $Δ$. At the center of our proof is a new fast spherical embedding theorem in the sense introduced by Bartal, Recht and Schulman (2011), which limits the embedded data diameter while preserving local Euclidean distances and avoiding ``distance collapse'' at larger scales. This fast embedding theorem may be of independent interest.