Between-User Collapse Under Popularity-Biased Feedback: A Centered-Covariance Theorem and Computable Phase Boundary

Abstract

We study how popularity-biased BPR training reshapes the between-user geometry of collaborative-filtering embeddings. We work with the mean-centered user covariance $C=\tfrac1n U^\top H U$, the object that measures how distinguishable users are from one another, as opposed to the uncentered second moment used in prior work. We prove that under popularity-biased feedback with stationary items, $C$ converges to a steady state proportional to the item-noise covariance $Q$. Thus between-user spread collapses toward a noise floor. We derive a closed-form, computable phase boundary in the training hyperparameters $(α,λ_{neg},γ,d)$ separating contraction from expansion, and validate both directional predictions on MovieLens-25M. We then examine the limits of the effect. At deployment-scale regularization the predicted contraction is real and policy-driven but small, and it is not reflected in any recommendation-level metric we measured. The $α$-driven anisotropic-collapse mechanism operates only at regularization strengths that degrade the recommender. A deployment-time restoration intervention derived from the theory does not improve recommendation quality. The boundary is computable from a trained model's embeddings, item interaction counts, and training hyperparameters, so a practitioner can check whether a deployed system sits in the strong-collapse regime without simulating the feedback loop. In our experiments the boundary places deployable settings far from that regime.