A graph layout is normally a table of N free coordinates. We optimise a function with a fixed number of parameters instead. This gives a drawing a sample complexity and an extensible domain. Force-directed algorithms remain the standard tools for graph drawing. The most accurate among them minimise stress in the Kamada-Kawai formulation by directly optimising the node coordinates, at a full objective cost of O(N2) in time and space. Here, we propose Fling (Field Layout via Implicit Neural Geometry), a small neural network mapping the distances of each node to a set of landmarks, positioning it in the plane by training on the layout energy. The full spring system then becomes tractable without its distance matrix, as rest lengths follow from a landmark bound in constant time per pair while a second network learns the majorisation sums from exact anchor rows, at O(∣A∣N) per step for ∣A∣≪N anchors. Unlike neural drawers that read the graph by message passing, we represent the drawing as a function of node features. An unseen node costs one forward pass, where sparse and low-rank majorisation remain transductive. As the unknowns are weights rather than coordinates, the energy only requires a small fraction of the nodes, and a field fitted that way outperforms PivotMDS, landmark MDS, and a kernel ridge trained on the same energy and features, when the task is fitting the energy of a graph from a sample of its nodes. In addition, the same parameterisation enables a stochastic pivot stress variant, an aesthetics-optimised variant carrying a neighbour-embedding energy with node-edge clearance and crossing terms on the same field, and conditioning on the weight between two energies gives a whole layout family from one run.
Graphs are commonly visualized in 2D, where humans readily interpret spatial relationships, yet such layouts often distort higher-dimensional structure. We propose to embed graphs in high-dimensional space and search for informative 2D viewpoints that optimize aesthetic and readability metrics (e.g., edge crossings and angular resolution), enabled by a novel differentiable surrogate for edge crossings. Numerical experiments show that these viewpoints consistently outperform standard 2D layouts, and can even surpass methods explicitly designed to optimize these metrics. We further introduce DataFly, an interactive system for exploring multiple candidate viewpoints through seamless navigation. A usability study demonstrates that our approach reveals structural patterns that remain hidden in conventional 2D visualizations.
Both Dimensionality Reduction (DR) and Graph Drawing (GD) aim to visualize abstract, non-linear structures, yet rely on different optimization paradigms. This contrast is evident in Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), which typically depends on the SMACOF algorithm despite graph drawing results showing that simpler stochastic optimization schemes can be more effective for the same objective. We bridge these domains by adapting Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) techniques from graph drawing to vector data embedding. We present a scikit-learn compatible estimator that minimizes global stress through local pairwise updates, improving upon the existing implementation. Experiments on standard high-dimensional benchmarks show that our stochastic solver converges substantially faster than SMACOF while achieving comparable or lower stress.
We study neural architectures in which each hidden layer is defined by the stationary state of a dissipative Schrödinger-type dynamics on a learned latent graph. On stable branches, the local stationary problem defines a differentiable implicit graph layer. To learn the graph itself, we optimize over the stratified moduli space of weighted graphs and equip each stratum with a non-degenerate Kähler-Hessian metric that keeps natural-gradient descent and face crossing well posed. We then show that a multilayer stationary network is equivalent to an exact global stationary problem on a supra-graph, and that it admits a penalized global relaxation whose stationary states converge to the exact one as the penalty parameter tends to infinity. Reverse-mode differentiation is recovered as the adjoint of the exact global system, and the penalized adjoint converges to it in the same limit. Finally, under finite-dimensional strong-monotonicity and admissible-lift assumptions, the corresponding represented hypothesis classes coincide among resolvent feed-forward networks, graph-stationary networks, supra-graph stationary systems, and sheaf-based architectures with unitary connection. The resulting structural identifications yield complexity bounds controlled by sparse graph or supra-graph geometry rather than dense ambient connectivity.