Group Invariant Spectral Embedding

Kernelized graph methods - spectral clustering, diffusion maps, and sparse kernel -regression graphs - that use Gaussian kernels depend on the choice of Gaussian bandwidth sigma, which governs the spectral character of the local kernel operator. When sigma is too small, the kernel overestimates local complexity and treats each sample as an independent direction; when sigma is too large, the kernel collapses multiple directions together, the condition number diverges, and all geometric discrimination is lost. We propose a choice of scale to make the spectral complexity of the kernel consistent with the intrinsic complexity of the underlying manifold. We propose a per-node bandwidth criterion that operationalizes this principle by jointly matching the kernel's effective rank to the local intrinsic dimension estimated via minimum spanning tree, anchoring the search in the manifold-consistent log-log scaling regime. We evaluate SSL embeddings from six encoders on CIFAR-100, showing that adaptive bandwidth consistently improves leave-one-out (LOO) classification and label propagation (LP) accuracy over fixed-bandwidth methods and competing adaptive methods.

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.

We study spectral clustering in the presence of a confounding latent geometry. The leading eigenvectors may then be dominated by the latent geometry rather than by the communities. Nevertheless, we show in a block latent-space model that communities can be recovered from eigenvectors deeper in the spectrum. We analyze the spectral properties of the adjacency matrix through a limiting integral operator and use its structure to develop DBSPEC, a density-based spectral clustering algorithm that requires only approximate localization of the informative eigenvalue and is robust to poor eigenvalue separation. Crucially, this approach handles general latent geometries, overcoming restrictions to homogeneous toroidal models in prior works. Our theoretical predictions for the location of the informative eigenvalue notably align with observations in real-world experiments.