Equivariant Neural Networks

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6 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

70 papers

Latest in Equivariant Neural Networks

Sep 22, 2026math.RT

Graded Representation Theory of Equivariant Neural Networks

Nonlinear activations can create equivariant interactions between irreducible representations that linear maps cannot. We use the Gaussian degree decomposition to extend ordinary polynomial degree to such nonlinear maps, and prove that for a fixed coordinatewise equivariant layer each degree factors into a polynomial determined by the linear maps and a scalar determined by the activation. This separates three distinct obstructions, coming from symmetry, coordinates, and activation.
Mani Shayestehfar
Sep 8, 2026cs.CR

Encrypt What Matters: When Selective Homomorphic Inference Is Efficient

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables inference on private data without revealing it to the server, but evaluating an entire input under FHE is expensive. We study \emph{selective homomorphic inference}, where only a sensitive region of interest (ROI) is encrypted, and computations independent of that region are performed in plaintext. Selective evaluation produces the same output as full FHE on the same model, without retraining. Its efficiency depends on how quickly encrypted dependencies spread through the network. For small encrypted ROIs, locality-preserving architectures can achieve order-of-magnitude homomorphic-evaluation speedups, whereas architectures with early global mixing provide essentially no speedup. These results identify locality as the key architectural property governing the benefit of selective homomorphic inference.
Ali Backour, Juan Reyes, Jaime Punyed +1
Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

Equivariance Breaks the Learning Rate

Equivariant networks are commonly trained with Adam, yet recent work reports that matrix-structured optimizers such as Muon can perform better on these architectures without explaining why. We identify one source of this difference inside equivariant linear layers. Each irrep block learns a channel-mixing matrix WlW_l shared across its 2l+12l+1 components, giving the expanded map Wl⊗I2l+1W_l \otimes I_{2l+1}. For a single application of the layer, the gradient of WlW_l sums 2l+12l+1 outer product contributions and has rank at most 2l+12l+1. Adam rescales stored weights individually without using the irrep boundaries, so one learning rate can produce different spectral step sizes across blocks within a layer. We address this mismatch by normalizing each block update separately, without introducing a new hyperparameter. This changes only the scale of the update, leaving Adam's moment estimates and its direction within each block unchanged. We evaluate the mechanism in a controlled SO(3)\mathrm{SO}(3)-equivariant model with a matched dense control and in an e3nn interatomic potential model trained on rMD17 and MD22. The toy setup isolates a mismatch that grows with width while the dense control shows no corresponding growth. In the interatomic potential model, block normalization and tuning Adam's momentum coefficients independently improve performance, but neither alone matches Muon. Combined, they make Adam competitive with Muon on all datasets, indicating that blockwise step control and momentum accumulation account for much of Muon's advantage.
Andrei Manolache, Mathias Niepert
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Value-Preserving Architectures for Agentic AI Systems

The emergence of agentic AI and LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) presents unprecedented opportunities for automating complex tasks, while simultaneously raising critical concerns about the preservation of fundamental human-centered values, such as privacy, fairness, and safety. Although software engineering has traditionally focused on functional correctness, the adoption of LLMs and AI agents into complex socio-technical systems has intensified the need for responsible software engineering and robust value alignment. In MAS, architectural design decisions, such as coordination mechanisms, communication protocols, and system topologies, play a central role in shaping system behavior and the outcomes they produce. This paper argues that architectural choices influence not only the functionality and performance of MAS but can also promote value-oriented system behavior. Therefore, we investigate how different architectural designs support different human-centered values, discussing the following value-preserving architectural patterns: (i) a privacy-aware architecture with a federated topology, (ii) a distributed architecture to promote pluralism and diversity, and (iii) a guard-agent architecture to detect and mitigate unfairness. Finally, we introduce representative use cases to illustrate the proposed architectures in real-world scenarios. By linking architectural design with human-centered values, this work lays the foundation for a unified set of architectural patterns and guidelines towards the design of trustworthy MAS.
Alessandro Pesare, Tommaso Dolci, Katja Hose +1
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Rotational Equivariance in Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Tutorial

Rotational symmetry is one of the most important structural principles in machine learning on 3D data. In applications ranging from physics and materials science to 3D computer vision, predictions should not depend on an arbitrary choice of coordinate frame. Rotational equivariance captures this requirement mathematically by enforcing that a rotation of the input induces a corresponding transformation of the model output. This tutorial provides a comprehensive introduction to rotational equivariance, starting from the physical and geometric intuition behind coordinate independence and building up the necessary machinery from geometric deep learning, group theory, and representation theory. We introduce message passing on Euclidean graphs, group actions and representations, spherical harmonics, Wigner matrices, tensor products, and Clebsch-Gordan decomposition, and explain how these ingredients give rise to modern equivariant architectures. We then survey the principal strategies for incorporating rotational equivariance in deep learning, including group convolutions, internal tensorial representations, and canonicalization-based methods, and discuss their practical strengths and limitations. The tutorial aims to lower the barrier to the subject by connecting the underlying mathematics to practical model design, by unifying ideas that are often expressed in different formal languages, and by helping practitioners choose among competing approaches through a clear discussion of their trade-offs.
Peter Lippmann, Fred A. Hamprecht
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Kolmogorov--Arnold against bounded translations

Historically originating from Hilbert's 13th problem, the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem (KART) has recently experienced a major revitalisation through its applications to neural networks, specifically Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). While the exact representation is well established, its stability under continuous adversarial perturbations of the hidden layer remains a critical open question. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of KART against bounded adversarial translations. We provide an explicit, self-contained, and constructive proof of an approximate representation using fixed, piecewise linear inner functions. Crucially, our construction employs a single outer function that remains invariant for all summands and is independent of the specific adversarial translation, provided its maximum bound is known a priori.
Sviatoslav V. Dzhenzher
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

No Equivariant Architecture Covers All Equivariant Attention

We give a complete characterization of equivariant multi-head self-attention (MHSA): if an MHSA layer is equivariant to a symmetry group GG, then GG can only act by permuting head-clusters, with QK and OV matrices satisfying an equivariance constraint tied to the group action. As a consequence, we prove that any fixed MHSA architecture that achieves exact equivariance by polynomially parameterizing unconstrained MHSA parameters inevitably leads to expressivity loss within the class of equivariant maps: the equivariance locus of unconstrained MHSA forms a union of extremely many Zariski-irreducible components in a reduced parameter space, and any single architecture covers at most one. For G=D4G=D_4 acting on CC copies of the regular representation as the token feature space, we show that there are Ω(C64)Ω(C^{64}) components for eight attention heads.
Tīkun Ông
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Reducing Symmetry Increase in Equivariant Neural Networks

Equivariant Neural Networks (ENNs) have empowered numerous applications in scientific fields. Despite their remarkable capacity for representing geometric structures, ENNs suffer from degraded expressivity when processing symmetric inputs: the output representations are invariant to transformations that extend beyond the input's symmetries. The mathematical essence of this phenomenon is that a symmetric input, after being processed by an equivariant map, experiences an increase in symmetry. While prior research has documented symmetry increase in specific cases, a rigorous understanding of its underlying causes and general reduction strategies remains lacking. In this paper, we provide a detailed and in-depth characterization of symmetry increase together with a principled framework for its reduction: (i) For any given feature space and input symmetry group, we prove that the increased symmetry admits an infimum determined by the structure of the feature space; (ii) Building on this foundation, we develop a computable algorithm to derive this infimum, and propose practical guidelines for feature design to prevent harmful symmetry increases. (iii) Under standard regularity assumptions, we demonstrate that for most equivariant maps, our guidelines effectively reduce symmetry increase. To complement our theoretical findings, we provide visualizations and experiments on both synthetic datasets and the real-world QM9 dataset. The results validate our theoretical predictions.
Ning Lin, Jiacheng Cen, Anyi Li +2
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Embedding Rotation Invariance for Provable Multi-Oriented Scene Text Recognition

Multi-oriented text is ubiquitous in real-world scenes and remains a major challenge for scene text recognition (STR). Existing rotation-aware methods explicitly estimate text orientation. However, due to the lack of theoretical guarantees, they are prone to error accumulation, increased computational cost, and strong reliance on data. In this work, we incorporate rotation invariance into the STR framework to address these limitations. Specifically, we adopt an encoder-decoder architecture, embedding rotation equivariance in the encoder and rotation invariance in the decoder to construct a fully rotation-invariant network. On the decoder side, we first identify and prove the rotation-invariant property of the cross-attention mechanism and use it to formulate a rotation-invariant text decoder that maps visual features to output text in a rotation-invariant manner. On the encoder side, we propose a rotation-equivariant local-global extraction network that integrates deep equivariant convolutions with self-attention, enabling rotation-equivariant feature extraction while modeling inter-character dependencies and preserving fine-grained visual details. By integrating the encoder and decoder, we obtain an end-to-end Rotation-Invariant Scene Text Recognition network (RISTER). RISTER provides rotation invariance with theoretical guarantees, enhancing robustness on multi-oriented samples without introducing additional inference computation or relying on data-driven orientation correction. Experiments show that RISTER achieves state-of-the-art performance on both standard and multi-oriented benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.0 percent in accuracy on the general multi-oriented dataset.
Zhibin Ma, Pengwen Dai, Yi Liu +3
Aug 5, 2026eess.SY

Certified Feedforward Tracking for Unknown Nonlinear Systems via Invertible Neural Networks

In this paper, we address the certification of datadriven feedforward control for periodic tracking of unknown nonlinear systems under partial state measurements. To this end, we adopt an invertible neural network (INN) as a surrogate for the unknown system. This choice allows us to bypass solving a nonconvex inversion problem, eliminating the associated inversion errors and reducing tracking error certification to a surrogate modeling problem. We then apply conformal prediction to provide finite-sample probabilistic guarantees on the surrogate modeling error which, through the derived tracking error bound, yield marginal certificates on feedforward tracking error. Finally, we demonstrate the approach on a DC-motor-driven mechanical load with nonlinear friction.
Berk Altiner, Rajasree Sarkar, Arunava Banerjee +2
Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

Contrast-invariant deep ptychography neural networks

Ptychography neural networks suffer from scaling inconsistencies when generalizing out of distribution, limiting their real world viability. We address this scaling mismatch using a factorization strategy which decouples the learned object texture from measurement scaling, enabling a single trained network to produce measurement-consistent reconstructions across varying illumination conditions. This requires predicting the learned object in real and imaginary units instead of the canonical amplitude and phase representation. We additionally introduce a synthetic object sampling strategy that minimizes phase distribution mismatch between synthetic training data and experimental targets. These improvements yield up to a 5x reduction in Fourier error over the previous PtychoPINN-torch baseline across 5 experimental datasets spanning multiple beamlines and facilities.
Albert Vong, Steven Henke, Oliver Hoidn +6
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Universality and Approximation Rates of Graph Neural Networks with Random Features

We investigate message-passing graph neural networks with random node features. Random node features are known to enhance the expressiveness of graph neural networks (GNNs) both theoretically and empirically. Here, we establish a novel universality result focusing on permutation-equivariant neural networks (PENNs), a class of GNNs built from feedforward neural network components that subsumes many prominent GNN architectures. We show that PENNs, combined with partially random node features, can approximate arbitrarily well in probability any measurable permutation-invariant or permutation-equivariant function on directed graphs of fixed size with multidimensional node and edge features. For kk-times continuously differentiable functions, k≥2k\geq 2, we also derive upper bounds on the approximation rates, relating the complexity of the feedforward components of a PENN in terms of layer depth and number of nonzero weights to the desired approximation accuracy.
Lukas Gonon, Thilo Meyer-Brandis, Niklas Weber
Jul 28, 2026cs.LG

Generator-Aligned Representation Interfaces for Diagnostic Soft Equivariance

Exact-equivariant architectures typically encode prescribed group actions in specialized operators, which can complicate their reuse with generic backbones and across data modalities. We introduce the Generator-Aligned Representation Interface (GARI), a representation-level design principle that exposes selected transformation generators to a generic sequence backbone through aligned canonical and generator-induced views. We formalize the resulting behavior using a probe-specific soft-equivariance residual defined over declared data and transformation distributions. This framework distinguishes representation consistency from task robustness and exact equivariance, and localizes residual mismatch to interface construction, shared stream processing, and terminal fusion. We instantiate the interface as GARI-Net, which constructs generator-indexed streams, converts them into a common interaction frame, processes them with shared parameters, repairs ordering-induced context mismatch, enables cross-stream information exchange, and aggregates them using inter-stream discrepancy. Direct Equivariance Error (DEE) provides a frozen-checkpoint diagnostic of the prescribed representation relation under known token or voxel actions. Experiments on genomic sequences, images, and three-dimensional point clouds examine sequence reversal, planar rotations and reflections, and controlled axial transfer. Across these settings, the same interface principle supports task-relevant transformation consistency and generalization to declared held-out probes without requiring group-specific redesign of the sequence backbone. GARI therefore provides a portable diagnostic complement to hard-equivariant architectures: it makes generator structure accessible, learnable, and measurable, while finite-probe evidence remains distinct from certification of exact equivariance over a continuous group.
Weitao Li, Gong Cheng
Jul 28, 2026hep-lat

Normalizing Flows to Reconstruct Pseudo-PDFs

We investigate a normalizing-flow approach for reconstructing parton distribution functions (PDFs) from synthetic matrix-element data. Our framework combines Gaussian Process priors with invertible neural networks to learn a posterior distribution over PDFs consistent with limited Ioffe-time data. We demonstrate that the architecture preserves physical constraints and extrapolation properties.
Yamil Cahuana Medrano, Kostas Orginos
Jul 25, 2026cs.CV

SHReg: Strictly Rotation-Equivariant Point Cloud Registration via Spherical Harmonics

Point cloud registration critically depends on local features that are both distinctive and robust to arbitrary 3D rotations. Existing learning-based methods typically approximate rotation invariance via fragile local reference frames or extensive data augmentation, providing only empirical invariance and often degrading under unseen rotational transformations. In this paper, we propose SHReg, a strictly rotation-equivariant point cloud registration framework grounded in the representation theory of SO(3)SO(3). By representing local geometric features as irreducible representations of SO(3)SO(3), SHReg guarantees exact equivariance under arbitrary rotations without relying on local reference frames. Built upon a spherical-harmonics-based equivariant backbone, SHReg jointly learns rotation-invariant descriptors for robust correspondence matching and rotation-equivariant features that preserve fine-grained orientation information. The preserved equivariant structure enables each correspondence to directly hypothesize a rigid transformation, reducing reliance on large-scale hypothesis sampling in conventional RANSAC-based pipelines and leading to improved robustness under challenging rotational variations. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, and KITTI demonstrate that SHReg consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in registration accuracy, particularly under large rotational perturbations.
Chongjian Wang, Junjie Gao
Jul 25, 2026q-fin.PM

Neural Network-Driven Volatility Drag Mitigation under Aggressive Leverage

This paper introduces a compact reformulation of a modular end-to-end neural network for global minimum-variance portfolio optimization that decouples model complexity from both look-back window length and universe size. A five-parameter hyperbolic weighted moving average combined with a saturating exponential replaces the original 2,400-parameter lag-transformation layer, and a bidirectional gated-recurrent-unit eigencleaning module together with a streamlined marginal-volatility network reduce total learnable parameters from 39,586 to just 2,175. In out-of-sample tests against state-of-the-art nonlinear-shrinkage and risk-parity benchmarks, the compact network attains the lowest realized portfolio variance without compromising expected return. Under long-only constraints, the variance reduction supports substantially higher leverage while maintaining comparable drawdown control. Validation in a high-fidelity trading simulator that incorporates realistic margin-call dynamics confirms enhanced over-leverage resilience. These findings demonstrate that end-to-end variance-minimization architectures can achieve substantial parameter efficiency and robust capital-efficiency gains without sacrificing risk-adjusted performance.
Christian Bongiorno, Efstratios Manolakis, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Flash EQ-Linear: Accelerating Equivariant Linear Layers via Group-wise Discrete Fourier Transform

Equivariant networks embed geometric symmetries as structural priors through weight sharing, achieving remarkable parameter efficiency across vision tasks. However, this parameter efficiency does not translate into compute efficiency: existing implementations unroll the structured weights into dense matrices and dispatch them to generic dense kernels, so the FLOPs of an equivariant layer are no smaller than those of a non-equivariant counterpart. In this paper, we observe that the equivariant linear (EQ-Linear) layer---the most fundamental and frequently used module in modern equivariant architectures---is essentially a circular convolution along the group dimension composed with a linear transform along the channel dimension. Building on this observation, we propose Flash EQ-Linear, an exact acceleration algorithm that reduces the complexity from O(NDC)\mathcal{O}(NDC) to O(NDC/T)\mathcal{O}(NDC/T) by combining the Fourier convolution theorem along the group dimension with the conjugate symmetry of the real DFT. We further provide dedicated CUDA kernels for Flash EQ-Linear, covering both forward and backward passes and both FP32 and FP16 precision. At the operator level, Flash EQ-Linear achieves up to 2×{2\times} forward speedup over PyTorch's F.linear; at the network level, Flash EQ-ViT and Flash EQ-Swin achieve up to 1.7×{1.7\times} end-to-end speedup over both equivariant and non-equivariant baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first time equivariant networks strictly dominate their non-equivariant counterparts along all three axes simultaneously: accuracy, parameter efficiency, and inference speed.Code is available at https://github.com/zhongchenzhao/FlashEQLinear.
Zhongchen Zhao, Jixin Wang, Qi Xie +4
Jul 19, 2026cs.CV

High-Capacity Robust Watermarking Technology for High-Resolution Images

Most existing watermarking techniques are primarily designed for low-resolution images, with few methods tailored for high-resolution images. Moreover, the embedding capacity is often limited to fixed lengths (e.g., 30, 100, 256 bits, etc.), which struggles to meet practical demands. To address these issues, this paper proposes a high-capacity robust watermarking method for high-resolution images, capable of embedding a watermark of 4 KB (32,768 bits) into images with a resolution of 1024*1024, achieving an embedding rate of 0.0313 bpp. Specifically, this paper adopts a block-wise strategy to effectively embed the watermark into local regions, enabling the network to train and learn normally even under low-resource conditions. The encoder and decoder structures respectively employ a reversible symmetric architecture with three convolutional and three deconvolutional layers, ensuring consistency in the coupling and decoupling of the watermark and image features. Additionally, the loss function combines global and local losses with weighted contributions. By incorporating constraints on the visual quality and robustness of local block regions, the overall imperceptibility and robustness of the image are further enhanced. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed method is effective and feasible in high-resolution image scenarios with high-capacity watermarking, while demonstrating strong robustness against various noise attacks.
Shaowu Wu, Wei Lu, Qing Qian +1
Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

E3DGS: Unified Geometric-Photometric Equivariance for 3D Gaussian Splatting via Color-as-Geometry Embedding

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) captures scenes by coupling explicit geometry (position, covariance) with view-dependent photometry (Spherical Harmonics). However, building SE(3)\mathrm{SE}(3)-equivariant architectures on these primitives presents a fundamental representation bottleneck. Color has been treated as a signal rather than a geometric entity, making it nontrivial to unify symmetry across geometry and appearance as the camera frame changes. While translations are handled by relative coordinates, rotations act heterogeneously across attributes: μ↦Rμμ\mapsto Rμ, Σ↦RΣR⊤Σ\mapsto RΣR^\top, and fℓ↦Dℓ(R)fℓf_\ell\mapsto D^\ell(R)f_\ell. This mismatch complicates strict equivariance, leading existing methods to either discard or flatten SH coefficients, thereby breaking symmetry. We propose a unified solution rooted in representation theory: for SH degrees ℓ≤2\ell\le2, photometry is algebraically isomorphic to a rank-2 geometric tensor. We prove that the Wigner-DD action on these SH coefficients can be exactly reformulated as the conjugation action on 3×33\times3 matrices. Leveraging this, we introduce the Unified Matrix Embedding, a lifting that maps all Gaussian attributes into a unified carrier space, gl(3)\mathfrak{gl}(3). Building on the "Color-as-Geometry" formulation, we present E3DGS, a rigid-body (SE(3)\mathrm{SE}(3)) equivariant architecture that processes 3D Gaussians without Clebsch-Gordan tensor products. Evaluations on object vision and action-conditioned Gaussian world modeling demonstrate that our unified approach yields strong robustness under camera-frame changes and improved data efficiency.
Chankyo Kim, Maani Ghaffari
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

Conditional Invertible Neural Networks for Data-Driven UAV Control: A 2-D Proof of Concept

We investigate conditional invertible neural networks (cINNs) as probabilistic inverse-dynamics models for multirotor control. For a planar X8 coaxial multicopter, we learn p(u∣st,ct)p(u \mid s_t, c_t) from an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) teacher using rational-quadratic spline coupling and invertible linear mixing. Open-loop reproduction reaches R2=0.944R^2 = 0.944, mean CRPS 0.0915, and log-probability-error correlation ρ=−0.60ρ= -0.60. Over 15 closed-loop scenarios, position RMSE matches INDI (9.7 vs. 9.5 m), with 47 percent tracking acceptably; failures separate into attitude divergence under aggressive steps and phase lag under high-frequency references, isolating command bandwidth and data coverage as dominant failure mechanisms.
Christian Wittke, Stephan Myschik, Oliver Niggemann
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

EquiFusion: Kinematics-Agnostic Human Motion Prediction via Equivariant Latent Diffusion

Existing Stochastic 3D Human Motion Prediction models are fundamentally constrained by hard-coding the skeleton kinematics, severely limiting generalization, preventing cross-dataset training, and requiring complex data retargeting. We introduce EquiFusion, the first kinematics-agnostic model to solve this bottleneck, implementing a latent diffusion model with a permutation equivariant architecture. EquiFusion treats the kinematics' connectivity as an explicit input parameter, ensuring its internal computations are inherently agnostic to joint ordering and graph structure. This novel design enables truly cross-dataset generalization to unseen kinematics and unlocks novel zero-shot directions, such as motion prediction from partial or occluded observations and targeted limb generation. EquiFusion achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks, being up to 75% more compact than previous kinematics-specific methods, while achieving faster training and inference. EquiFusion thus establishes a new, flexible standard for robust human motion prediction. Model and training code are available at https://ceveloper.github.io/publications/equifusion/.
Cecilia Curreli, Florian Hofherr, Dominik Muhle +3
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Integrated Forward-Inverse Network for Lensless Image Reconstruction

Lensless imaging enables compact and versatile computational cameras by replacing bulky optics with thin coded elements. However, reconstruction from the resulting measurements is challenging: large-footprint point-spread functions (PSFs) produce highly multiplexed observations, making inversion severely ill-conditioned and sensitive to calibration errors and model mismatch. While deep learning approaches, including hybrid models that incorporate physics priors, have shown promise, explicitly maintaining data fidelity throughout the network hierarchy remains difficult. Here, we propose the Integrated Forward-Inverse Network (IFIN), a physics-guided architecture that interleaves differentiable forward projections with learnable inverse updates at every scale, enabling complementary cues to be exploited jointly in the measurement and image domains. This bidirectional coupling supports progressive, physics-consistent refinement and permits system-constrained PSF kernel adaptation under model uncertainty. On challenging lensless benchmarks, including a newly introduced dataset, IFIN achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. We further observe competitive performance on Gaussian deblurring and simulated inline holography reconstruction, suggesting that the same interleaving principle can extend beyond lensless cameras.
Donggeon Bae, Jaewoo Jung, Yong Guk Kang +6
Jul 4, 2026cs.LG

Foundations of Equivariant Deep Learning: Unifying Graph and Sheaf Neural Networks

Symmetry is everywhere in nature and society. Geometric deep learning exploits symmetries in data to improve the performance and efficiency of deep learning systems. In this paper, we extend geometric deep learning to utilize richer symmetry structures. Specifically, we develop order-equivariant neural networks (OENN), which generalize standard graph message passing and sheaf neural networks via the theory of equivariant bundles over face posets (face categories). We (i) characterize all linear order-equivariant maps, (ii) build OENN layers, and (iii) prove universal approximation theorems (UATs) for continuous order-equivariant maps, which are new results even when restricted to sheaf neural networks (for which no UAT was known before). We illustrate the framework on graph and sheaf models. Our results can also be seen as extending the known UAT for graph neural networks to a more general setting that subsumes sheaf neural networks as well. In addition, we show that OENN can be extended further to CENN, Category-Equivariant Neural Network, which gives the general form of equivariant neural networks as well as of equivariant universal approximation theorems, allowing us to leverage categorical symmetry in data (e.g., non-invertible symmetries on multiple objects with compositional relations on those symmetries).
Yoshihiro Maruyama
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Spin-Weighted Spherical Harmonics Enable Complete and Scalable E(3)\mathrm{E}(3)-Equivariant Networks

E(3)\mathrm{E}(3)-equivariant networks are promising for 3D atomistic system modeling, yet their scalability is limited by the O(L6)O(L^6) complexity of the Clebsch-Gordan Tensor Product (CGTP). The recently proposed Gaunt Tensor Product (GTP) reduces the complexity but is unable to capture the antisymmetric paths, resulting in incomplete expressivity. In this work, we present SpinGTP, an approach to overcome the GTP incompleteness by generalizing from scalar functions to Spin-Weighted Spherical Harmonics (SWSH). By relying on the algebraic properties of SWSH, SpinGTP recovers the missing antisymmetric interactions while maintaining the asymptotic efficiency of GTP. It also allows for a more expressive equivariant basis that naturally accounts for the parity-odd components of tensor products. We evaluate SpinGTP across diverse benchmarks, including Tetris, 3BPA, SPICE-MACE-OFF, and OC20. Our results show that SpinGTP achieves accuracies comparable to full CGTP. Notably, by explicitly capturing antisymmetric paths, SpinGTP exhibits superior performance in tasks involving chiral materials and non-centrosymmetric geometries. This work provides a complete, scalable, and mathematically rigorous path toward high-order equivariance in large-scale 3D atomistic system simulations.
Chenxing Liang, Yuchao Lin, Andrii Kryvenko +5
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Feedforward Networks: Reentry Neural Systems as the Fundamental Basis of Subjecthood and Intrinsic Safety of Next-Generation AGI

We propose a complete architectural blueprint for safe artificial general intelligence based on a closed reentry loop (D <-> I cycle). In contrast to feedforward networks, which are directed acyclic graphs (C=0, S=0) incapable of self-reference, the proposed architecture contains a structural cycle (C >= 1) with self-sustaining amplification (rho > 1), mathematically guaranteeing the emergence of a self-model, instrumental self-preservation, and unprogrammed goal-directed behaviour. The agent's goals are encoded as a non-textual D-vector in the architecture itself, making them immune to reinterpretation and prompt injection. We present the S-measure -- a polynomial-time [O(N^3)] computable alternative to Tononi's NP-hard Phi -- with machine-verified Lean 4 proof that S>0 implies positive integrated information. The work provides full Python/NumPy implementations (Tarjan-based cycle complexity, Delta-S barrier), industrial horizontal scaling via Apache Kafka and Docker Compose, a taxonomy of six epochs of AI evolution, a zoo of future reentry architectures (RAS, diffusion attractors, fractal loops), gauge-invariant networks for safe swarms, fault-tolerance and recovery protocols, and eight falsifiable predictions. All formal proofs are machine-verified in Lean 4. This architecture is deployable today and represents a topologically protected, safe-by-design approach to AGI.
A. S. Ushakov, Yu. N. Berdinsk
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Equivariance and Augmentation for Bayesian Neural Networks

Symmetries are important for many deep learning tasks, ranging from applications in the sciences to medical imaging. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether to impose symmetry constraints on the neural network architecture (yielding equivariant neural networks) or learn them from augmented training data. Although equivariant networks are well-studied theoretically, much less is known about data augmentation, since analyzing augmentation requires control over the training dynamics. Inspired by recent results that show that augmented infinite deep ensembles are exactly equivariant, we study data augmentation for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) trained with variational inference. We focus on variational distributions in the exponential family and derive conditions under which exact equivariance is reached. We furthermore obtain bounds on the equivariance error and introduce three novel symmetrization techniques which boost the effect of data augmentation in this setting. We conduct extensive numerical experiments which show that one of our symmetrization methods (orbit expansion) outperforms the baseline in both equivariance and overall performance. Our code is available at github.com/dmw1998/augment-BNNs
Miaowen Dong, Axel Flinth, Jan E. Gerken
Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

Efficient Cross-Scale Invertible Hiding Network with Spatial-Frequency Collaboration and Non-Invertible Mechanism

Image hiding aims to conceal image-level messages within cover images at the same resolution. Invertible neural networks (INN)-based image hiding has emerged as an important branch. It treats concealing and revealing as a pair of inverse problems on image domain transformation and uses INN's forward and backward processes to address them. Due to architectural constraints, existing INN-based methods suffer from single-scale and single-domain feature extraction and limited nonlinear representation capability, resulting in inferior image quality. To mitigate these limitations, we propose an efficient cross-scale invertible hiding network with the spatial-frequency collaboration and the non-invertible mechanism, termed CrosInv. CrosInv exploits cross-scale and spatial-frequency collaborative features while enhancing nonlinear representation. Specifically, we introduce a cross-scale invertible module that bijectively maps inputs to cross-scale representations. To effectively integrate spatial and frequency information, the cross-scale invertible module employs pixel shuffle, Haar wavelet transformation, and their inverse operations for scale transformation. Furthermore, a non-invertible cross dense module is integrated to enhance the nonlinearity. Comprehensive experiments verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed CrosInv.
Junxue Yang, Xin Liao
Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

REViT: Roto-reflection Equivariant Convolutional Vision Transformer

In this paper, we propose a discrete roto-reflection group equivariant vision transformer with convolutional attention. Roto-reflection equivariant networks preserve the rotational, flip and positional symmetry in feature maps, making them useful for tasks where orientation of the inputs is relevant to the model outputs. In image classification and object detection, most of the studies on roto-reflection equivariant models have focused on using convolutional neural networks rather than vision transformers. In this paper, we examine the challenges involved in achieving equivariance in vision transformers, and we propose a simpler way to implement a discretized roto-reflection group equivariant vision transformer. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing approaches for developing discrete roto-reflection group equivariant neural networks for image classification.
Sheir A. Zaheer, Alexander C. Holston, Chan Y. Park
Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

Invertible Neural Network Adapter for One-Step Flow Matching in Robot Manipulation

This paper presents an invertible neural network adapter for general robotic manipulation, designed to generate precise high-dimensional actions conditioned on multimodal observations, including visual, linguistic, and proprioceptive inputs, through a one-step denoising process. Built upon a flow-matching formulation, the proposed adapter effectively constrains the action generation trajectory within an invertible latent space, thereby enabling efficient and high-quality dexterous action synthesis with only a single inference step. Compared with conventional iterative flow-matching policies, the proposed framework substantially reduces inference complexity while maintaining strong action prediction accuracy and stability. Extensive experiments are conducted across a diverse set of simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic platforms to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Across simulation benchmarks, the proposed adapter consistently demonstrates superior or near state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of manipulation tasks. Furthermore, real-world experiments reveal a significant improvement in inference efficiency for vision-language-action (VLA) models, reducing the average inference latency from 110 ms to 61 ms while maintaining strong task performance.
Yu Zhang, Kangyi Ji, Yongxiang Zou +3
Jun 17, 2026cs.LG

What Your Model Threw Away and Why You'll Want It Back: Masking, Fingerprinting, and Privacy from Discarded Geometry

We develop a framework for the information discarded by machine learning models whose inputs carry a Lie group action. Given a representation ππ of a Lie group GG on a space VV and a learned function f ⁣:V→Rf\colon V \to \mathbb{R}, we define two objects measuring the symmetry invisible to ff. The null fiber at a point x∈Vx \in V is the set NG(f,x)={g∈G:f(π(g−1)⋅x)=f(x)}N_G(f,x) = \{g \in G : f(π(g^{-1}) \cdot x) = f(x)\} of group elements whose inverse action on xx is undetectable by ff. When NG(f,x)N_G(f,x) is independent of xx, it coincides with the stabilizer StabG(f)\mathrm{Stab}_G(f), the largest subgroup of GG under which ff is invariant. For smooth maps to R\mathbb{R}, the preimage theorem guarantees that null fibers have dimension at least dim⁡G−1\dim G - 1 at generic inputs, regardless of architecture. For compact groups acting on themselves, the Peter--Weyl theorem yields a spectral characterization of both objects in terms of the Fourier coefficient matrices of ff. We show that null fiber elements can be computed efficiently via Newton iteration on the orbit map, at a cost comparable to a few gradient evaluations. Applications to data masking, model fingerprinting, and privacy-preserving computation are developed and tested experimentally on molecular property prediction under SO(3)\mathrm{SO}(3) and spherical image classification under the Möbius group PSL(2,C)\mathrm{PSL}(2, \mathbb{C}). The framework applies uniformly to classical neural networks and variational quantum circuits.
Zachary P. Bradshaw
Jun 16, 2026cs.LG

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.
Simon Dräger
Jun 14, 2026cs.LG

Scalar-pathway fidelity improves physical accuracy in short-range equivariant interatomic potentials

Accurate interatomic potentials enable molecular dynamics of materials, molecules, and interfaces beyond density-functional-theory length and time scales. Equivariant neural network potentials have improved the representation of local geometry. However, their deployable energy surfaces ultimately manifest through invariant scalar channels, whose aggregation and spectral resolution remain comparatively underexamined. Here we use Physics-Aware Neighborhood (PAN) pooling and Physics-Guided Spectral (PGS) mixers as controlled scalar-pathway probes: lightweight, symmetry-preserving modifications that act only on ℓ=0\ell=0 channels while leaving the equivariant tensor backbone unchanged. Using MACE as a high-body-order mechanistic scaffold, PAN adds coordination-sensitive amplitude modulation, whereas PGS augments edge and readout scalar features with radial and tapered spectral bases. Across metallic Ag, covalent Si, a short-range ionic LiF/Li--F subset, and MD17/rMD17 molecules, this scalar-pathway correction reduces MACE force errors by 22--27% and energy errors by 19--22%; on systems with stress labels, stress errors decrease by 27--28%, at approximately 5% additional inference-FLOPs cost. Directionally consistent gains in Allegro and NequIP further indicate that the correction is portable across distinct short-range equivariant backbones, although effect sizes remain architecture-dependent. These results identify scalar-pathway fidelity as a practical design dimension for short-range equivariant interatomic potentials.
Jia Bi, Alin Marin Elena, Samuel Pinilla
Jun 13, 2026cs.LG

LieBN: Batch Normalization over Lie Groups

Manifold-valued measurements are prevalent in various machine learning tasks. Recent advances have extended Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to operate on manifolds, accompanied by normalization techniques tailored to different geometries, collectively referred to as Riemannian normalization. However, most existing Riemannian normalization methods are either designed for specific manifolds or fail to effectively normalize manifold-valued sample distributions. To address these limitations, we propose LieBN, a framework for Riemannian Batch Normalization (RBN) over Lie groups. Our approach leverages the theoretically convenient left- and right-invariant metrics, which naturally exist in every Lie group, and provides theoretical guarantees for controlling the Riemannian mean and variance. We instantiate LieBN across nine distinct geometries: four on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold, one on the group of rotation matrices, and four on the manifold of full-rank correlation matrices. Notably, among the SPD metrics, we introduce a novel right-invariant metric and extend three existing Lie group structures via matrix power deformation. Extensive experiments on different manifolds validate the effectiveness of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/LieBN.git.
Ziheng Chen, Yue Song, Rui Wang +2
Jun 11, 2026eess.IV

High-Fidelity Video Compression based on Invertible Neural Transform and Implicit Conditioning

Learning-based video compression has recently achieved competitive rate-distortion performance compared to conventional video codecs. However, most existing methods rely on non-invertible analysis-synthesis transforms, with reconstruction quality subject to both quantization and transform approximation errors. This limitation becomes particularly restrictive at higher quality points, where quantization errors are small and transform-induced distortion dominates. To address this, we propose InnVC, an Invertible neural network based Video Codec for wide-range and high-fidelity compression. The core idea is to preserve an invertible main transform path prior to quantization, while injecting content-adaptive context through a compact implicit conditioning field. This decouples strongly correlated video content from harder-to-model fine details, allowing different components to specialize in complementary reconstruction tasks for more efficient compression. To further improve compressibility, we introduce a scheduled masking strategy that progressively concentrates informative content into fewer latent channels for more effective entropy coding. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that InnVC achieves strong compression performance over a broad quality range, being particularly effective in the high-quality regime, yielding BD-rate reductions of 21.66% in PSNR and 46.06% in MS-SSIM relative to x265 on UVG. To the best of our knowledge, InnVC is the first neural video codec covers operating poins from low bitrate to high fidelity within a single architecture scale, spanning more than 20 dB in PSNR.
Siyue Teng, Ho Man Kwan, Yuxuan Jiang +2
Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Conservation Laws from Data Symmetry in Neural Networks

We explore whether intrinsic symmetries of the training data lead to conserved quantities during gradient-flow training of neural networks. Under the assumption that the loss function is analytic and non-polynomial, we prove that data symmetries generically do not induce any additional integrals of motion. For mean squared error (MSE) loss, on the other hand, there are situations in which data augmentation yields extra conserved quantities. We build a framework, utilizing \emph{tensorizable networks} to describe this phenomenon. Tensorizable networks are a family of architectures whose dependence on parameters and inputs can be separated using an intermediate representation. They include linear and polynomial networks, as well as Lightning Attention.
Jakob Galley, Vahid Shahverdi, Axel Flinth
Jun 8, 2026cs.GR

Continuous Neural Reparameterization as a Deep Geometric Prior for Robust Fixed-Chart UV Repair

Traditional UV unwrapping relies on direct optimization of geometric distortion energies and can fail through invalid initialization, local minima, or topological foldovers. We recast fixed-chart UV unwrapping as continuous neural reparameterization: an untrained SIREN maps per-vertex mesh features to UV coordinates, and its weights are optimized for a geometric objective. The practical contribution is a robust chart-solver recipe, combining Laplace--Beltrami spectral inputs, Tutte residual warm-up, a C2C^2 determinant extension, an injectivity barrier, and validity-checked retry/fallback routing, rather than a claim that any single component guarantees validity or that recutting methods should be replaced. NTK--LBO diagnostics show that spectral conditioning changes update geometry, especially at initialization and mid-rank subspaces, but does not by itself predict chart success. On compact pre-cut charts and a 47-chart stratified Thingi10K/xatlas-cut benchmark, the neural solver produces zero flips on all compact charts and 42/47 valid zero-flip stratified solves. BFF and OptCuts comparisons sharpen the scope: recutting can be faster and lower-distortion when allowed, while the neural solver targets supplied-chart validity and validation-first atlas construction. On Amara Spatial generated meshes, the full atlas construction path gives packed-atlas coverage on a 25-asset set and 1000/1000 strict locally valid atlases with zero UV flips in a large-scale Rust atlas run after fallback routing.
Mohammad Sadegh Salehi
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

Equivariant Neural Belief Propagation

Probabilistic inference over spatially embedded variables requires beliefs that respect SE(3)SE(3) symmetry, yet existing equivariant networks produce only scalars and vectors -- not the rank-2 precision tensors needed for anisotropic uncertainty, and single-component messages collapse multi-modal energy landscapes to physically meaningless averages. We introduce Equivariant Neural Belief Propagation (ENBP), a factor-graph framework whose messages are equivariant Gaussian mixture models with sufficient statistics that transform exactly under SE(3)SE(3). Rank-2 precision matrices are synthesised via equivariant outer products, ingested through differentiable spectral decomposition, and kept tractable by a greedy KL-based mixture reduction that provably commutes with SE(3)SE(3). On GEOM-QM9 and GEOM-Drugs, ENBP achieves 98.9% conformational coverage at 0.090 A˚\mathring{A} error with sub-second latency -- over 100×100\times faster than diffusion baselines at higher accuracy. On multi-body robotic inference, vanilla loopy BP diverges at 15+ agents while ENBP converges with near-zero collision rates and machine-precision equivariance error (∼10−7{\sim}10^{-7} vs.\ 10−110^{-1} for augmented baselines).
Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun
Jun 3, 2026eess.IV

Tractogram foundation model

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is the only noninvasive approach for mapping white-matter pathways in the living human brain. It represents each brain as a tractogram: a large, unordered set of three-dimensional streamlines that includes information about both local streamline geometry and whole-brain anatomical organization. This structure makes tractograms a natural but challenging target for representation learning. Existing methods treat streamline classification and subject-level prediction as separate problems: streamline classifiers focus on geometric patterns, whereas subject-level prediction often depends on hand-crafted features. As a result, current methods do not learn reusable representations that connect streamline anatomy with whole-brain inter-subject variation. Here we introduce TractFM, a tractogram foundation model that learns reusable representations directly from whole-brain streamline sets. TractFM combines a local streamline encoder with a permutation-equivariant tractogram encoder, allowing all streamlines from a subject to be contextualized jointly in a single forward pass. Pretraining on dense anatomical tract parcellation, i.e., assigning anatomical labels to individual streamlines, yields two complementary representations: contextualized streamline-level embeddings for tract parcellation and compact subject-level descriptors for downstream prediction of subject phenotypes. Across three tractography algorithms and five dMRI datasets, TractFM transfers to both streamline-level and subject-level tasks. Its frozen representations achieve accurate tract parcellation and predict age and sex across independent datasets. These results show that whole-brain geometric context, learned once, can generalize across tractography pipelines, datasets, and prediction tasks.
Guikun Chen, Yuqian Chen, Yijie Li +5
Jun 1, 2026math.DG

Theoretical Aspects of Lie Groupoid and Lie Algebroid Equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks

We introduce Lie groupoid equivariant neural networks as a specialization of recently proposed topological category-equivariant neural networks to the differentiable setting. Lie groupoid equivariant neural networks are composed from Lie groupoid lifting convolutions and Lie groupoid convolution layers, and we show how for suitable Lie groupoids they are equivalent to certain Lie algebroid-equivariant neural networks. We additionally describe groupoid invariant global pooling as a generalization of group invariant global pooling. Furthermore, we show that each of the aforementioned layers is a special case of recently introduced admissible category-equivariant layers by demonstrating that they define continuous natural transformations between continuous feature functors.
Michael Astwood
Jun 1, 2026cs.LG

Expressivity of congruence-based architectures for DNNs on positive-definite matrices

This work studies neural architectures for classifying symmetric positive-definite matrices, focusing on congruence-like layers, in which the input matrix is multiplied on the left and right by a (possibly rectangular) weight matrix WW and its transpose. Such layers lie at the core of the celebrated SPDNet and have also been employed independently for dimensionality reduction on positive-definite data. We show that the (semi)-orthogonality constraint commonly imposed on WW limits the expressivity of these layers: for certain activation functions, the resulting architecture collapses to a one-hidden-layer equivalent. This lack of expressivity follows from a loss of spectral diversity in congruence-like layers for semi-orthogonal WW and is a direct consequence of Poincaré's separation theorem. We then examine the choice of the final classifier, comparing several Riemannian classifiers and discussing their compatibility with the feature maps produced by congruence-like layers.
Antonin Oswald, Estelle Massart
May 31, 2026cs.LG

Revisiting Neural Processes via Fourier Transform and Volterra Series

Modeling unknown latent functions from finite, irregularly sampled measurements is a recurring challenge across science and engineering. Neural processes (NPs), a family of probabilistic functional models, are promising solutions -- especially when endowed with domain-specific symmetries like translation equivariance, which improve sample efficiency and generalization. Yet existing translation-equivariant NPs face two limitations: (i) they stack generic components with non-linearities, obscuring the induced function class and limiting interpretability; and (ii) convolutional designs are limited by local receptive fields and the need to embed inputs onto a dense uniform grid, while attention-based alternatives lift these restrictions at quadratic cost in the number of observations. We address both with two contributions. First, using the Volterra expansion, we approximate continuous translation-equivariant operators by sums of higher-order convolutions, yielding analytical transparency while admitting efficient evaluation via first-order convolutions. Second, we introduce set Fourier convolutions (SFConvs), a frequency-domain parameterization that operates directly on irregularly sampled points, achieves approximately global receptive fields, and scales linearly in the number of observations. Building on these ideas, we propose two conditional NPs (CNPs): SFConvCNPs, which stack SFConv blocks with non-linearities, and SFVConvCNPs, which integrate the Volterra formulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our methods' efficacy against state-of-the-art baselines.
Peiman Mohseni, Nick Duffield, Raymond K. W. Wong
May 26, 2026cond-mat.soft

On the Equivariant Learning of the QQ-tensor Order Parameter

We construct and evaluate group-equivariant neural networks for the prediction of the two-dimensional QQ-tensor order parameter of nematic liquid crystals from synthetically generated microscopic textures. Seven architectures, equivariant to cyclic groups CkC_k of order kk for k=4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256k=4,\,8,\,16,\,32,\,64,\,128,\, 256, are built using a combination of weight-sharing constraints, equivariant activations and regularization techniques. To do this, we construct rotation-like permutation matrix groups with elements ϱCk(g)\varrho_{C_k}(g) that act on row-wise vectorized images, thereby approximating a 2πk\frac{2π}{k} rotation of the circular subdomain on square images. We show that all seven equivariant models satisfy the QQ-tensor equivariance constraint to within single-precision floating point accuracy. Comparing against approximate parameter-matched non-equivariant benchmarks, with and without data augmentation, we find that the equivariant models consistently achieve lower errors and generalize more robustly to unseen defect configurations. Performance increases with group order, suggesting that the incorporation of finer rotational symmetry leads to lower errors.
Julia Navarro, Mark Wilkinson
May 26, 2026cs.LG

How the Optimizer Shapes Learned Solutions in Equivariant Neural Networks

Equivariant neural networks encode geometric symmetries by construction, yet they are often difficult to optimize and can underperform less constrained architectures. A growing body of work addresses this through architectural modifications such as constraint relaxation or approximate equivariance, while the role of the optimizer remains comparatively underexplored. We study this direction by comparing Muon and Adam across several equivariant and geometric architectures under pointcloud and molecular learning settings. On ModelNet40, where the comparison is clearest, Muon consistently improves over Adam across all architectures considered. We then analyze the trained ModelNet40 checkpoints through Hessian estimates, loss surface visualizations, and spectral properties of learned weights and intermediate representations. The checkpoints reached by Muon have larger Hessian curvature summaries but more regular loss surfaces, and their learned weights and representations have higher stable and effective ranks. These observations suggest that the interaction between optimizer design and geometric inductive bias deserves further attention from the community.
Teodor-Mihai Stupariu, Andrei Manolache
May 25, 2026cs.LG

Metric-Aware PCA as a Linear Instance of Geometric Deep Learning

Geometric deep learning organises neural architectures around the symmetries of their data domain, with the choice of symmetry group serving as a geometric prior that determines what representations can be learned. Metric-Aware Principal Component Analysis (MAPCA) parameterises principal component analysis by a positive-definite metric matrix, with a canonical subfamily interpolating between standard PCA and output whitening and a diagonal-metric point recovering Invariant PCA (IPCA). This paper positions MAPCA within the geometric deep learning framework. The metric is read as the geometric prior; the orthogonal group preserving it is the symmetry group it induces; MAPCA solutions are equivariant under this group with the resulting spectrum invariant; and MAPCA's defining constraint is the linear analogue of the Schur-type weight constraints used in equivariant networks. Across six axes - domain, symmetry group, equivariance, invariance, architectural primitive, and geometric prior - we construct a precise dictionary between MAPCA and geometric deep learning. The technical anchor is a uniqueness theorem characterising IPCA as the unique linear data-derived metric in the MAPCA family that is equivariant under arbitrary diagonal rescaling and projects onto the fixed-point set of the action, equivalent under normalisation to the variance-maximisation criterion in its precise form. The paper closes with three bridges: kernel PCA as the nonlinear extension, spectral graph methods as MAPCA on graphs, and a deep MAPCA construction extending the positioning into deep equivariant networks
Michael Leznik
May 16, 2026cs.LG

Tensor Channel Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Polarizability Prediction

We introduce a tensor-channel equivariant graph neural network for direct prediction of molecular polarizability tensors. Building on the efficient PaiNN architecture, we augment the hidden representation with explicit symmetric rank-2 tensor channels aligned with the decomposition of polarizability into isotropic and anisotropic components. In contrast to approaches that construct tensor outputs only at readout, our model propagates tensor structure throughout message passing using geometrically motivated tensor bases. This yields a target-aligned architecture for tensor-valued molecular prediction. On optimized QM7-X geometries, the proposed model achieves lower full-tensor and anisotropic error than both a PaiNN-style readout baseline and a dielectric MACE baseline under matched training conditions and at nearly identical parameter count. In this controlled setting, it also outperforms MACE while remaining substantially faster at inference. Ablation studies show that the gain does not arise from increased capacity alone, but from the combination of explicit tensor propagation and a traceless target parameterization matched to the anisotropic part of the polarizability tensor. Among the tensor bases considered, the strongest results are obtained from interactions between learned directional features, indicating that these are particularly effective for modeling molecular polarizability. Rotational equivariance tests further confirm that all compared models are numerically equivariant, so the observed improvements are attributable to better learning of the target tensor itself. Overall, our results show that for structured tensor-valued targets, propagating target-aligned tensor features can outperform both readout-only tensor construction and a more general higher-order equivariant model in the present training setting.
Jean Philip Filling, Daniel Franzen, Michael Wand
May 15, 2026eess.IV

TVRN: Invertible Neural Networks for Compression-Aware Temporal Video Rescaling

To fit diverse display and bandwidth constraints, high-frame-rate videos are temporally downscaled to low-frame-rate (LFR) and later upscaled, requiring joint optimization for effective frame-rate rescaling. However, existing methods typically link the two operations via training objectives, without fully exploiting their reciprocal nature, which may cause high-frequency information loss. Moreover, they overlook the impact of lossy codecs on LFR videos, limiting real-world applicability. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for compression-aware frame-rate rescaling, named TVRN. To regularize high-frequency information lost during frame-rate downscaling, TVRN adopts an invertible architecture that combines a Multi-Input Multi-Output Temporal Wavelet Transform with a high-frequency reconstruction module. To enable end-to-end training through non-differentiable lossy codecs, we design a surrogate network that approximates their gradients. Finally, to improve robustness under various compression levels, we extend TVRN to an asymmetric architecture by incorporating compression-aware features learned via a learning-to-rank strategy. Extensive experiments show that TVRN outperforms existing methods in reconstruction quality under industrial video compression settings. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/fengxinmin/TVRN_public.
Xinmin Feng, Li Li, Dong Liu +1
May 13, 2026cs.LG

Twincher: Bijective Representation Learning for Robust Inversion of Continuous Systems

Recent advances in AI have been primarily driven by large-scale neural architectures that excel at function approximation, rather than by tailored inductive biases and inference or learning strategies that could be important for resource-efficient real-world perception and planning through the solution of inverse problems. In this work, we consider the possibility of enabling robust inversion of continuous forward processes p↦yp \mapsto y by learning representations of yy that are bijectively aligned with pp while remaining insensitive to perturbations in yy caused by noise or model mismatch. We propose Twincher, a class of architectures based on stacks of structured diffeomorphic transformations and tailored adversarial training strategies that enable learning such bijective representations. We provide a public API for training and inference and empirically demonstrate the ability of the proposed architecture to efficiently learn bijective representations of synthetic systems, thereby enabling robust and efficient iterative inverse inference. Compared to a baseline inverse-modeling approach, the method exhibits improved data efficiency and robustness, providing initial evidence for the potential of bijective representation learning in robotics, vision, and physical AI.
Arkady Gonoskov
May 9, 2026cs.LG

Compact SO(3) Equivariant Atomistic Foundation Models via Structural Pruning

SO(3) equivariant graph neural networks have become the dominant paradigm for atomistic foundation models, achieving high accuracy and data efficiency by building rotational symmetry directly into the architecture. Yet the computational cost of their higher-order tensor operations creates a tough trade-off between model accuracy and inference efficiency. In this paper, we propose a structural pruning method for SO(3) equivariant atomistic foundation models to bridge this accuracy-efficiency gap. The pruning is applied along the channel and order dimensions, with each irreducible representation kept or removed as a complete block, thereby retaining SO(3) equivariance. Starting from a large checkpoint, the pruned model substantially reduces the inference cost while retaining higher accuracy than an independently trained small model. The pruned MACE-MP model outperforms the official from-scratch trained small model on 7 of 9 metrics on the Matbench Discovery leaderboard. In terms of efficiency, compressed MACE-MP and MACE-OFF models contain 1.5×\times to 4×\times fewer parameters and require 2.5×\times to 4×\times less pre-training compute than training a small model from scratch. For downstream applications, fine-tuning the pruned model reduces energy and force errors by 70.1% and 34.4% compared to training task-specific models from scratch across eight representative downstream datasets. We demonstrate that the method generalizes to other SO(3) equivariant architectures (SevenNet, eSCN) and can be combined with quantization and knowledge distillation for further gains.
Chen Wang, Siyu Hu, Guangming Tan +1
May 8, 2026cs.LG

Embedding Dimension Lower Bounds for Universality of Deep Sets and Janossy Pooling

In many practical applications it is important to build symmetries into neural network architectures. Consider the important case of permutation symmetry on point clouds consisting of nn points in dd dimensions. In this case the network learns a function on a set of nn points in Rd\mathbb{R}^d, and a natural paradigm for constructing invariant networks is Janossy pooling, which generalizes the popular Deep Sets architecture. We study the universality of this approach, in particular the important question of how large the embedding dimension must be to guarantee universality of this architecture. Specifically, using a novel technique, we prove new lower bounds on the required size of this embedding dimension. For Deep Sets, this gives the correct minimal dimension up to a constant factor for all d>1d > 1. For kk-ary Janossy pooling, we prove the first non-trivial lower bound on the required embedding dimension when k>1k > 1.
Ali Syed, Aditya Nambiar, Jonathan W. Siegel
May 7, 2026cs.LG

A Generalized Singular Value Theory for Neural Networks

Building on the abstract Generalized Singular Value Decomposition (GSVD) theory of Brown et al. [2025], we prove that most modern neural architectures admit a generalized SVD representation in which they are left-invertible before a final linear layer, with no change in input-output behavior. Furthermore, the left-invertible nonlinear portion of the input-output behavior can be made to be \emph{norm preserving}, meaning that perturbations in the left-invertible ``embedding'' (the activations prior to the final linear layer in this representation) correspond proportionally to changes in the input, i.e., distance in feature space can be calibrated directly to distance in input space. We provide a data-driven algorithm for estimating this representation from trained models and propose a model architecture that naturally facilitates the decomposition. We then provide a proof-of-concept that the learned representation can be used to identify adversarial perturbations to model inputs, and develop the theory necessary for future applications to areas such as model bias and invertibility.
Brian Charles Brown, Robert Bridges, David Grimsman +2
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Geometric Kolmogorov--Arnold Network (GeoKAN)

We introduce Geometric Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (GeoKANs), a family of geometry-aware KAN-type models in which approximation is carried out in learned, geometry-adapted coordinates rather than in fixed Euclidean input coordinates. GeoKAN achieves this by learning a diagonal Riemannian metric that warps the input before basis expansion and feature mixing. The learned metric provides a geometric inductive bias through local length scaling and volume distortion, and in physics-informed settings it also affects the differential structure seen by the model. Within this framework, we develop three main variants, namely GeoKAN-NNMetric, GeoKAN-γγ, and LM-KAN. For LM-KAN, we further consider three basis-specific versions, LM-KAN-RBF, LM-KAN-Wav, and LM-KAN-Fourier. These variants allow us to study geometry-aware KAN models both as general function approximators and as surrogates in physics-informed learning. By stretching regions with rapid variation and compressing smoother regions, GeoKAN reallocates representational resolution in a task-dependent manner, allowing the model to place capacity where it is most needed. As a result, GeoKAN is well suited to sharp, stiff, localized, and strongly non-uniform regimes arising in scientific machine learning and differential-equation problems.
Abhijit Sen, Bikram Keshari Parida, Giridas Maiti +2
May 6, 2026stat.ML

Permutation-preserving Functions and Neural Vecchia Covariance Kernels

We introduce a novel framework for constructing scalable and flexible covariance kernels for Gaussian processes (GPs) by directly learning the covariance structure under a regression-type parameterization induced by Vecchia approximations, using deep neural architectures. Specifically, we model kriging coefficients and conditional standard deviations, deterministic quantities that uniquely characterize the covariance, providing stable and informative learning targets. Exploiting the permutation-equivariant structure of conditioning sets in the Vecchia factorization, we derive a universal representation for permutation-preserving functions and design neural architectures that respect this symmetry, leading to improved training stability and data efficiency. The proposed approach enables expressive, non-stationary kernel learning while maintaining computational scalability, thereby bridging classical GP methodology with modern deep learning.
Jian Cao, Nian Liu, Ying Lin
May 5, 2026cs.LG

Model synthesis and identifiability analysis of stiff chemical reaction systems with inVAErt networks

We consider the problem of learning data-driven replicas for stiff systems of ordinary differential equations arising in chemical kinetics that can be evaluated with high computational efficiency. We first focus on training emulators for families of reaction equations under varying reaction rates, using conditional residual networks or long-short term memory architectures. We then apply a recently proposed data-driven framework known as ``inVAErt networks'' to address the ill-posed inverse problem of inferring reaction rates, integration time, and possibly initial conditions from a target set of species concentrations - a problem that has received relatively little attention in the literature. The proposed approach is demonstrated on chemical systems with reversible and irreversible kinetics, spanning 2 to 20 differential equations, 3 to 20 chemical species, and 3 to 25 reaction rate parameters. Relative root mean squared errors produced by the proposed emulators range from 10−510^{-5} for lower-dimensional systems to 10−410^{-4} and 10−310^{-3} for an air pollution model and a hydrogen-air reaction system, respectively. Manifolds of non-identifiable reaction rates recovered by the proposed approach can be analytically verified for simple systems and are consistent with local identifiability analysis in higher dimensions.
Sreejata Dey, Guoxiang Grayson Tong, Jonathan F. MacArt +1
May 4, 2026cs.CV

Augmented Equivariant Mesh Networks for Anatomical Segmentation

Anatomical mesh segmentation requires models that operate directly on irregular surface geometry while remaining robust to arbitrary patient pose and mesh resolution variation. Existing task-specific mesh and point-cloud methods are not equivariant, and can degrade sharply under test-time perturbation, for example dropping by 25-26 IoU points on intraoral scan segmentation at 40∘40^\circ tilt. We present EAMS, an Equivariant Anatomical Mesh Segmentor built on Equivariant Mesh Neural Networks (EMNN), and evaluate it across four clinically distinct tasks spanning edge-, vertex-, and face-level supervision. We combine intrinsic mesh descriptors with anatomy-aware priors, including PCA-derived frames for dental arches and liver surfaces, and augment message passing to provide lightweight global context. Across intracranial aneurysm and intraoral segmentation, EAMS variants are competitive with specialized baselines on unperturbed inputs while remaining stable under geometric perturbations, and on liver surfaces they expose a favorable trade-off between canonical-pose accuracy and rotation robustness. These results show that a lightweight (<2<2M parameters) equivariant framework can deliver robust anatomical mesh segmentation across diverse supervision types without task-specific architectures.
Daniel Saragih
Apr 27, 2026cs.AI

Generative Design of a Gas Turbine Combustor Using Invertible Neural Networks

The need to burn 100% H2 in high efficient gas turbines featuring low NOx combustion in premix mode require the complete redesign of the combustion system to ensure stable operation without any flashback. Since all engine frames featuring a power range from 4 MW up to 600 MW are affected, a huge design effort is expected. To reduce this effort, especially to transfer knowledge between the different engine classes, generative design methods using latest AI technology will provide promising potential. In this work, this challenge is approached utilizing the current advances in generative artificial intelligence. We train an Invertible Neural Network (INN) on an expandable database of geometrically parameterized combustor designs with simulated performance labels. Utilizing the INN in its inverse direction, multiple design proposals are generated which fulfill specified performance labels.
Patrick Krüger, Hanno Gottschalk, Werner Krebs +1
Apr 26, 2026cs.LG

Quasi-Equivariant Metanetworks

Metanetworks are neural architectures designed to operate directly on pretrained weights to perform downstream tasks. However, the parameter space serves only as a proxy for the underlying function class, and the parameter-function mapping is inherently non-injective: distinct parameter configurations may yield identical input-output behaviors. As a result, metanetworks that rely solely on raw parameters risk overlooking the intrinsic symmetries of the architecture. Reasoning about functional identity is therefore essential for effective metanetwork design, motivating the development of equivariant metanetworks, which incorporate equivariance principles to respect architectural symmetries. Existing approaches, however, typically enforce strict equivariance, which imposes rigid constraints and often leads to sparse and less expressive models. To address this limitation, we introduce the novel concept of quasi-equivariance, which allows metanetworks to move beyond the rigidity of strict equivariance while still preserving functional identity. We lay down a principled basis for this framework and demonstrate its broad applicability across diverse neural architectures, including feedforward, convolutional, and transformer networks. Through empirical evaluation, we show that quasi-equivariant metanetworks achieve good trade-offs between symmetry preservation and representational expressivity. These findings advance the theoretical understanding of weight-space learning and provide a principled foundation for the design of more expressive and functionally robust metanetworks.
Viet-Hoang Tran, An Nguyen, Benoît Guérand +2
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Sheaf Neural Networks on SPD Manifolds: Second-Order Geometric Representation Learning

Graph neural networks face two fundamental challenges rooted in the linear structure of Euclidean vector spaces: (1) Current architectures represent geometry through vectors (directions, gradients), yet many tasks require matrix-valued representations that capture relationships between directions-such as how atomic orientations covary in a molecule. These second-order representations are naturally captured by points on the symmetric positive definite matrices (SPD) manifold; (2) Standard message passing applies shared transformations across edges. Sheaf neural networks address this via edge-specific transformations, but existing formulations remain confined to vector spaces and therefore cannot propagate matrix-valued features. We address both challenges by developing the first sheaf neural network operates natively on the SPD manifold. Our key insight is that the SPD manifold admits a Lie group structure, enabling well-posed analogs of sheaf operators without projecting to Euclidean space. Theoretically, we prove that SPD-valued sheaves are strictly more expressive than Euclidean sheaves: they admit consistent configurations (global sections) that vector-valued sheaves cannot represent, directly translating to richer learned representations. Empirically, our sheaf convolution transforms effectively rank-1 directional inputs into full-rank matrices encoding local geometric structure. Our dual-stream architecture achieves SOTA on 6/7 MoleculeNet benchmarks, with the sheaf framework providing consistent depth robustness.
Yuhan Peng, Junwen Dong, Yuzhi Zeng +6
Apr 19, 2026eess.SP

Leveraging Kernel Symmetry for Joint Compression and Error Mitigation in Edge Model Transfer

This paper investigates communication-efficient neural network transmission by exploiting structured symmetry constraints in convolutional kernels. Instead of transmitting all model parameters, we propose a degrees-of-freedom (DoF) based codec that sends only the unique coefficients implied by a chosen symmetry group, enabling deterministic reconstruction of the full weight tensor at the receiver. The proposed framework is evaluated under quantization and noisy channel conditions across multiple symmetry patterns, signal-to-noise ratios, and bit-widths. To improve robustness against transmission impairments, a projection step is further applied at the receiver to enforce consistency with the symmetry-invariant subspace, effectively denoising corrupted parameters. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 using a DeepCNN architecture demonstrate that DoF-based transmission achieves substantial bandwidth reduction while preserving significantly higher accuracy than pruning-based baselines, which often suffer catastrophic degradation. Among the tested symmetries, \textit{central-skew symmetry} consistently provides the best accuracy-compression tradeoff, confirming that structured redundancy can be leveraged for reliable and efficient neural model delivery over constrained links.
Anis Hamadouche, Mathini Sellathurai
Apr 18, 2026math.NA

Convergence theory for Hermite approximations under adaptive coordinate transformations

Recent work has shown that parameterizing and optimizing coordinate transformations using normalizing flows, i.e., invertible neural networks, can significantly accelerate the convergence of spectral approximations. We present the first error estimates for approximating functions using Hermite expansions composed with adaptive coordinate transformations. Our analysis establishes an equivalence principle: approximating a function ff in the span of the transformed basis is equivalent to approximating the pullback of ff in the span of Hermite functions. This allows us to leverage the classical approximation theory of Hermite expansions to derive error estimates in transformed coordinates in terms of the regularity of the pullback. We present an example demonstrating how a nonlinear coordinate transformation can enhance the convergence of Hermite expansions. Focusing on smooth functions decaying along the real axis, we construct a monotone transport map that aligns the decay of the target function with the Hermite basis. This guarantees spectral convergence rates for the corresponding Hermite expansion. Our analysis provides theoretical insight into the convergence behavior of adaptive Hermite approximations based on normalizing flows, as recently explored in the computational quantum physics literature.
Yahya Saleh
Mar 25, 2026stat.ME

Amortized Inference for Correlated Discrete Choice Models via Equivariant Neural Networks

Discrete choice models are fundamental tools in management science, economics, and marketing for understanding and predicting decision-making. Logit-based models are dominant in applied work, largely due to their convenient closed-form expressions for choice probabilities. However, they impose restrictive assumptions on the stochastic utility component, constraining our ability to capture realistic substitution patterns. We propose an amortized inference approach that relies on a neural network emulator to approximate choice probabilities for general error distributions, including those with correlated errors. We develop a specialized neural network architecture designed to respect the invariance properties of discrete choice models. We provide group-theoretic foundations for the architecture, including a proof of universal approximation given a minimal set of invariant features. Once trained, the emulator enables rapid likelihood evaluation and gradient computation. We use Sobolev training, augmenting the likelihood loss with a gradient-matching penalty, so that the emulator learns both choice probabilities and their derivatives. We show that emulator-based maximum likelihood estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal under mild approximation conditions, and we provide sandwich standard errors that remain valid for a psuedo-true parameter even with imperfect likelihood approximation. Simulations show significant gains over the GHK simulator in accuracy and speed.
Easton Huch, Michael Keane