Escaping the Capacity Ceiling: Routing on the Stiefel Manifold for Bilinear SPD Layers

Deep networks on the symmetric positive-definite (SPD) manifold promise expressive representations by encoding data geometry as an inductive bias, but stacking BiMap layers with the standard ReEig nonlinearity often adds no capacity: on real, preconditioned EEG data, ReEig rarely activates, so the stack behaves as a single layer at any depth. In the worst case, when domains share no discriminative directions, we prove a single filter has a capacity ceiling, so it cannot fully align every domain at once. To overcome that, we propose SCAP (Stiefel Cross-Attention Pool), a layer implementing a family of Stiefel filters by combining a pool of K experts into a sample-specific bilinear map via cross-attention. We show that it matches a per-domain filter bank to first order with fewer experts than domains when domain-optimal filters span few directions near a shared tangent-space basepoint; in the worst case, its alignment empirically stays nearly flat as domains grow, escaping the fixed-filter ceiling. Naively trained, however, this routing can collapse to a fixed filter; we diagnose why and adapt three mechanisms to mitigate it. SCAP significantly improves balanced accuracy over fixed-filter SPDNet on all five cross-domain EEG motor-imagery datasets, and matches or exceeds three domain-adaptive baselines on four out of five.