1 Visualizing Riemannian data with Rie-SNE Faithful visualizations of data residing on manifolds must take the underlying geometry into account when producing a flat planar view of the data. In this paper, we extend the classic stochastic neighbor embedding (SNE) algorithm to data on general Riemannian manifolds. We replace standard Gaussian assumptions with Riemannian diffusion counterparts and propose an efficient approximation that only requires access to calculations of Riemannian distances and volumes. We demonstrate that the approach also allows for mapping data from one manifold to another, e.g. from a high-dimensional sphere to a low-dimensional one. 2 authors · Mar 17, 2022
1 Principal subbundles for dimension reduction In this paper we demonstrate how sub-Riemannian geometry can be used for manifold learning and surface reconstruction by combining local linear approximations of a point cloud to obtain lower dimensional bundles. Local approximations obtained by local PCAs are collected into a rank k tangent subbundle on R^d, k<d, which we call a principal subbundle. This determines a sub-Riemannian metric on R^d. We show that sub-Riemannian geodesics with respect to this metric can successfully be applied to a number of important problems, such as: explicit construction of an approximating submanifold M, construction of a representation of the point-cloud in R^k, and computation of distances between observations, taking the learned geometry into account. The reconstruction is guaranteed to equal the true submanifold in the limit case where tangent spaces are estimated exactly. Via simulations, we show that the framework is robust when applied to noisy data. Furthermore, the framework generalizes to observations on an a priori known Riemannian manifold. 5 authors · Jul 6, 2023
1 A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE). 7 authors · May 30, 2023
2 Classification of BCI-EEG based on augmented covariance matrix Objective: Electroencephalography signals are recorded as a multidimensional dataset. We propose a new framework based on the augmented covariance extracted from an autoregressive model to improve motor imagery classification. Methods: From the autoregressive model can be derived the Yule-Walker equations, which show the emergence of a symmetric positive definite matrix: the augmented covariance matrix. The state-of the art for classifying covariance matrices is based on Riemannian Geometry. A fairly natural idea is therefore to extend the standard approach using these augmented covariance matrices. The methodology for creating the augmented covariance matrix shows a natural connection with the delay embedding theorem proposed by Takens for dynamical systems. Such an embedding method is based on the knowledge of two parameters: the delay and the embedding dimension, respectively related to the lag and the order of the autoregressive model. This approach provides new methods to compute the hyper-parameters in addition to standard grid search. Results: The augmented covariance matrix performed noticeably better than any state-of-the-art methods. We will test our approach on several datasets and several subjects using the MOABB framework, using both within-session and cross-session evaluation. Conclusion: The improvement in results is due to the fact that the augmented covariance matrix incorporates not only spatial but also temporal information, incorporating nonlinear components of the signal through an embedding procedure, which allows the leveraging of dynamical systems algorithms. Significance: These results extend the concepts and the results of the Riemannian distance based classification algorithm. 2 authors · Feb 9, 2023
- Sliced-Wasserstein on Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices for M/EEG Signals When dealing with electro or magnetoencephalography records, many supervised prediction tasks are solved by working with covariance matrices to summarize the signals. Learning with these matrices requires using Riemanian geometry to account for their structure. In this paper, we propose a new method to deal with distributions of covariance matrices and demonstrate its computational efficiency on M/EEG multivariate time series. More specifically, we define a Sliced-Wasserstein distance between measures of symmetric positive definite matrices that comes with strong theoretical guarantees. Then, we take advantage of its properties and kernel methods to apply this distance to brain-age prediction from MEG data and compare it to state-of-the-art algorithms based on Riemannian geometry. Finally, we show that it is an efficient surrogate to the Wasserstein distance in domain adaptation for Brain Computer Interface applications. 7 authors · Mar 10, 2023
1 Riemannian Adaptive Optimization Methods Several first order stochastic optimization methods commonly used in the Euclidean domain such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), accelerated gradient descent or variance reduced methods have already been adapted to certain Riemannian settings. However, some of the most popular of these optimization tools - namely Adam , Adagrad and the more recent Amsgrad - remain to be generalized to Riemannian manifolds. We discuss the difficulty of generalizing such adaptive schemes to the most agnostic Riemannian setting, and then provide algorithms and convergence proofs for geodesically convex objectives in the particular case of a product of Riemannian manifolds, in which adaptivity is implemented across manifolds in the cartesian product. Our generalization is tight in the sense that choosing the Euclidean space as Riemannian manifold yields the same algorithms and regret bounds as those that were already known for the standard algorithms. Experimentally, we show faster convergence and to a lower train loss value for Riemannian adaptive methods over their corresponding baselines on the realistic task of embedding the WordNet taxonomy in the Poincare ball. 2 authors · Oct 1, 2018
1 Flagfolds By interpreting the product of the Principal Component Analysis, that is the covariance matrix, as a sequence of nested subspaces naturally coming with weights according to the level of approximation they provide, we are able to embed all d--dimensional Grassmannians into a stratified space of covariance matrices. We observe that Grassmannians constitute the lowest dimensional skeleton of the stratification while it is possible to define a Riemaniann metric on the highest dimensional and dense stratum, such a metric being compatible with the global stratification. With such a Riemaniann metric at hand, it is possible to look for geodesics between two linear subspaces of different dimensions that do not go through higher dimensional linear subspaces as would euclidean geodesics. Building upon the proposed embedding of Grassmannians into the stratified space of covariance matrices, we generalize the concept of varifolds to what we call flagfolds in order to model multi-dimensional shapes. 2 authors · May 17, 2023
1 Scaling Riemannian Diffusion Models Riemannian diffusion models draw inspiration from standard Euclidean space diffusion models to learn distributions on general manifolds. Unfortunately, the additional geometric complexity renders the diffusion transition term inexpressible in closed form, so prior methods resort to imprecise approximations of the score matching training objective that degrade performance and preclude applications in high dimensions. In this work, we reexamine these approximations and propose several practical improvements. Our key observation is that most relevant manifolds are symmetric spaces, which are much more amenable to computation. By leveraging and combining various ans\"{a}tze, we can quickly compute relevant quantities to high precision. On low dimensional datasets, our correction produces a noticeable improvement, allowing diffusion to compete with other methods. Additionally, we show that our method enables us to scale to high dimensional tasks on nontrivial manifolds. In particular, we model QCD densities on SU(n) lattices and contrastively learned embeddings on high dimensional hyperspheres. 3 authors · Oct 30, 2023
- Hyperbolic Diffusion Embedding and Distance for Hierarchical Representation Learning Finding meaningful representations and distances of hierarchical data is important in many fields. This paper presents a new method for hierarchical data embedding and distance. Our method relies on combining diffusion geometry, a central approach to manifold learning, and hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, using diffusion geometry, we build multi-scale densities on the data, aimed to reveal their hierarchical structure, and then embed them into a product of hyperbolic spaces. We show theoretically that our embedding and distance recover the underlying hierarchical structure. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and its advantages compared to existing methods on graph embedding benchmarks and hierarchical datasets. 4 authors · May 30, 2023
1 O(n)-invariant Riemannian metrics on SPD matrices Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices are ubiquitous in data analysis under the form of covariance matrices or correlation matrices. Several O(n)-invariant Riemannian metrics were defined on the SPD cone, in particular the kernel metrics introduced by Hiai and Petz. The class of kernel metrics interpolates between many classical O(n)-invariant metrics and it satisfies key results of stability and completeness. However, it does not contain all the classical O(n)-invariant metrics. Therefore in this work, we investigate super-classes of kernel metrics and we study which key results remain true. We also introduce an additional key result called cometric-stability, a crucial property to implement geodesics with a Hamiltonian formulation. Our method to build intermediate embedded classes between O(n)-invariant metrics and kernel metrics is to give a characterization of the whole class of O(n)-invariant metrics on SPD matrices and to specify requirements on metrics one by one until we reach kernel metrics. As a secondary contribution, we synthesize the literature on the main O(n)-invariant metrics, we provide the complete formula of the sectional curvature of the affine-invariant metric and the formula of the geodesic parallel transport between commuting matrices for the Bures-Wasserstein metric. 2 authors · Sep 13, 2021
- Federated Wasserstein Distance We introduce a principled way of computing the Wasserstein distance between two distributions in a federated manner. Namely, we show how to estimate the Wasserstein distance between two samples stored and kept on different devices/clients whilst a central entity/server orchestrates the computations (again, without having access to the samples). To achieve this feat, we take advantage of the geometric properties of the Wasserstein distance -- in particular, the triangle inequality -- and that of the associated {\em geodesics}: our algorithm, FedWad (for Federated Wasserstein Distance), iteratively approximates the Wasserstein distance by manipulating and exchanging distributions from the space of geodesics in lieu of the input samples. In addition to establishing the convergence properties of FedWad, we provide empirical results on federated coresets and federate optimal transport dataset distance, that we respectively exploit for building a novel federated model and for boosting performance of popular federated learning algorithms. 3 authors · Oct 3, 2023
- Learning to Normalize on the SPD Manifold under Bures-Wasserstein Geometry Covariance matrices have proven highly effective across many scientific fields. Since these matrices lie within the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold - a Riemannian space with intrinsic non-Euclidean geometry, the primary challenge in representation learning is to respect this underlying geometric structure. Drawing inspiration from the success of Euclidean deep learning, researchers have developed neural networks on the SPD manifolds for more faithful covariance embedding learning. A notable advancement in this area is the implementation of Riemannian batch normalization (RBN), which has been shown to improve the performance of SPD network models. Nonetheless, the Riemannian metric beneath the existing RBN might fail to effectively deal with the ill-conditioned SPD matrices (ICSM), undermining the effectiveness of RBN. In contrast, the Bures-Wasserstein metric (BWM) demonstrates superior performance for ill-conditioning. In addition, the recently introduced Generalized BWM (GBWM) parameterizes the vanilla BWM via an SPD matrix, allowing for a more nuanced representation of vibrant geometries of the SPD manifold. Therefore, we propose a novel RBN algorithm based on the GBW geometry, incorporating a learnable metric parameter. Moreover, the deformation of GBWM by matrix power is also introduced to further enhance the representational capacity of GBWM-based RBN. Experimental results on different datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. 5 authors · Apr 1, 2025
- Flow Matching on General Geometries We propose Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM), a simple yet powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows on manifolds. Existing methods for generative modeling on manifolds either require expensive simulation, are inherently unable to scale to high dimensions, or use approximations for limiting quantities that result in biased training objectives. Riemannian Flow Matching bypasses these limitations and offers several advantages over previous approaches: it is simulation-free on simple geometries, does not require divergence computation, and computes its target vector field in closed-form. The key ingredient behind RFM is the construction of a relatively simple premetric for defining target vector fields, which encompasses the existing Euclidean case. To extend to general geometries, we rely on the use of spectral decompositions to efficiently compute premetrics on the fly. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on many real-world non-Euclidean datasets, and we demonstrate tractable training on general geometries, including triangular meshes with highly non-trivial curvature and boundaries. 2 authors · Feb 7, 2023
- A Lie Group Approach to Riemannian Batch Normalization Manifold-valued measurements exist in numerous applications within computer vision and machine learning. Recent studies have extended Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to manifolds, and concomitantly, normalization techniques have also been adapted to several manifolds, referred to as Riemannian normalization. Nonetheless, most of the existing Riemannian normalization methods have been derived in an ad hoc manner and only apply to specific manifolds. This paper establishes a unified framework for Riemannian Batch Normalization (RBN) techniques on Lie groups. Our framework offers the theoretical guarantee of controlling both the Riemannian mean and variance. Empirically, we focus on Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifolds, which possess three distinct types of Lie group structures. Using the deformation concept, we generalize the existing Lie groups on SPD manifolds into three families of parameterized Lie groups. Specific normalization layers induced by these Lie groups are then proposed for SPD neural networks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through three sets of experiments: radar recognition, human action recognition, and electroencephalography (EEG) classification. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/LieBN.git. 4 authors · Mar 17, 2024
- Finsler Metric Clustering in Weighted Projective Spaces This paper develops a hierarchical clustering algorithm for weighted projective spaces P_{q}, utilizing a Finsler metric d_F([z], [w]) and its rational analogue d_{F,Q}([z], [w]) to define distances that preserve the non-Euclidean geometry of these quotient manifolds. Defined via geodesic integrals of a scaling invariant Finsler norm weighted by the grades q = (q_0, q_1, dots, q_n), these metrics satisfy true metric properties including the triangle inequality, overcoming the limitations of the non-metric dissimilarity measure from prior work. 1 authors · May 7, 2025
- Fast hyperboloid decision tree algorithms Hyperbolic geometry is gaining traction in machine learning for its effectiveness at capturing hierarchical structures in real-world data. Hyperbolic spaces, where neighborhoods grow exponentially, offer substantial advantages and consistently deliver state-of-the-art results across diverse applications. However, hyperbolic classifiers often grapple with computational challenges. Methods reliant on Riemannian optimization frequently exhibit sluggishness, stemming from the increased computational demands of operations on Riemannian manifolds. In response to these challenges, we present hyperDT, a novel extension of decision tree algorithms into hyperbolic space. Crucially, hyperDT eliminates the need for computationally intensive Riemannian optimization, numerically unstable exponential and logarithmic maps, or pairwise comparisons between points by leveraging inner products to adapt Euclidean decision tree algorithms to hyperbolic space. Our approach is conceptually straightforward and maintains constant-time decision complexity while mitigating the scalability issues inherent in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Building upon hyperDT we introduce hyperRF, a hyperbolic random forest model. Extensive benchmarking across diverse datasets underscores the superior performance of these models, providing a swift, precise, accurate, and user-friendly toolkit for hyperbolic data analysis. 4 authors · Oct 20, 2023
1 Deformable Surface Reconstruction via Riemannian Metric Preservation Estimating the pose of an object from a monocular image is an inverse problem fundamental in computer vision. The ill-posed nature of this problem requires incorporating deformation priors to solve it. In practice, many materials do not perceptibly shrink or extend when manipulated, constituting a powerful and well-known prior. Mathematically, this translates to the preservation of the Riemannian metric. Neural networks offer the perfect playground to solve the surface reconstruction problem as they can approximate surfaces with arbitrary precision and allow the computation of differential geometry quantities. This paper presents an approach to inferring continuous deformable surfaces from a sequence of images, which is benchmarked against several techniques and obtains state-of-the-art performance without the need for offline training. 3 authors · Dec 22, 2022
1 Barycentric Subspace Analysis on Manifolds This paper investigates the generalization of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to Riemannian manifolds. We first propose a new and general type of family of subspaces in manifolds that we call barycentric subspaces. They are implicitly defined as the locus of points which are weighted means of k+1 reference points. As this definition relies on points and not on tangent vectors, it can also be extended to geodesic spaces which are not Riemannian. For instance, in stratified spaces, it naturally allows principal subspaces that span several strata, which is impossible in previous generalizations of PCA. We show that barycentric subspaces locally define a submanifold of dimension k which generalizes geodesic subspaces.Second, we rephrase PCA in Euclidean spaces as an optimization on flags of linear subspaces (a hierarchy of properly embedded linear subspaces of increasing dimension). We show that the Euclidean PCA minimizes the Accumulated Unexplained Variances by all the subspaces of the flag (AUV). Barycentric subspaces are naturally nested, allowing the construction of hierarchically nested subspaces. Optimizing the AUV criterion to optimally approximate data points with flags of affine spans in Riemannian manifolds lead to a particularly appealing generalization of PCA on manifolds called Barycentric Subspaces Analysis (BSA). 1 authors · Jul 11, 2016
- Riemannian Batch Normalization: A Gyro Approach Normalization layers are crucial for deep learning, but their Euclidean formulations are inadequate for data on manifolds. On the other hand, many Riemannian manifolds in machine learning admit gyro-structures, enabling principled extensions of Euclidean neural networks to non-Euclidean domains. Inspired by this, we introduce GyroBN, a principled Riemannian batch normalization framework for gyrogroups. We establish two necessary conditions, namely pseudo-reduction and gyroisometric gyrations, that guarantee GyroBN with theoretical control over sample statistics, and show that these conditions hold for all known gyrogroups in machine learning. Our framework also incorporates several existing Riemannian normalization methods as special cases. We further instantiate GyroBN on seven representative geometries, including the Grassmannian, five constant curvature spaces, and the correlation manifold, and derive novel gyro and Riemannian structures to enable these instantiations. Experiments across these geometries demonstrate the effectiveness of GyroBN. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/GyroBN.git. 4 authors · Sep 8, 2025
- Diffusion Curvature for Estimating Local Curvature in High Dimensional Data We introduce a new intrinsic measure of local curvature on point-cloud data called diffusion curvature. Our measure uses the framework of diffusion maps, including the data diffusion operator, to structure point cloud data and define local curvature based on the laziness of a random walk starting at a point or region of the data. We show that this laziness directly relates to volume comparison results from Riemannian geometry. We then extend this scalar curvature notion to an entire quadratic form using neural network estimations based on the diffusion map of point-cloud data. We show applications of both estimations on toy data, single-cell data, and on estimating local Hessian matrices of neural network loss landscapes. 7 authors · Jun 8, 2022
- Simplifying Momentum-based Positive-definite Submanifold Optimization with Applications to Deep Learning Riemannian submanifold optimization with momentum is computationally challenging because, to ensure that the iterates remain on the submanifold, we often need to solve difficult differential equations. Here, we simplify such difficulties for a class of structured symmetric positive-definite matrices with the affine-invariant metric. We do so by proposing a generalized version of the Riemannian normal coordinates that dynamically orthonormalizes the metric and locally converts the problem into an unconstrained problem in the Euclidean space. We use our approach to simplify existing approaches for structured covariances and develop matrix-inverse-free 2^nd-order optimizers for deep learning in low precision settings. Code: https://github.com/yorkerlin/StructuredNGD-DL 6 authors · Feb 19, 2023
1 Riemannian generative decoder Riemannian representation learning typically relies on approximating densities on chosen manifolds. This involves optimizing difficult objectives, potentially harming models. To completely circumvent this issue, we introduce the Riemannian generative decoder which finds manifold-valued maximum likelihood latents with a Riemannian optimizer while training a decoder network. By discarding the encoder, we vastly simplify the manifold constraint compared to current approaches which often only handle few specific manifolds. We validate our approach on three case studies -- a synthetic branching diffusion process, human migrations inferred from mitochondrial DNA, and cells undergoing a cell division cycle -- each showing that learned representations respect the prescribed geometry and capture intrinsic non-Euclidean structure. Our method requires only a decoder, is compatible with existing architectures, and yields interpretable latent spaces aligned with data geometry. 3 authors · Jun 23, 2025
1 Riemannian Score-Based Generative Modelling Score-based generative models (SGMs) are a powerful class of generative models that exhibit remarkable empirical performance. Score-based generative modelling (SGM) consists of a ``noising'' stage, whereby a diffusion is used to gradually add Gaussian noise to data, and a generative model, which entails a ``denoising'' process defined by approximating the time-reversal of the diffusion. Existing SGMs assume that data is supported on a Euclidean space, i.e. a manifold with flat geometry. In many domains such as robotics, geoscience or protein modelling, data is often naturally described by distributions living on Riemannian manifolds and current SGM techniques are not appropriate. We introduce here Riemannian Score-based Generative Models (RSGMs), a class of generative models extending SGMs to Riemannian manifolds. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of manifolds, and in particular with earth and climate science spherical data. 6 authors · Feb 6, 2022
1 Intrinsic Sliced Wasserstein Distances for Comparing Collections of Probability Distributions on Manifolds and Graphs Collections of probability distributions arise in a variety of applications ranging from user activity pattern analysis to brain connectomics. In practice these distributions can be defined over diverse domain types including finite intervals, circles, cylinders, spheres, other manifolds, and graphs. This paper introduces an approach for detecting differences between two collections of distributions over such general domains. To this end, we propose the intrinsic slicing construction that yields a novel class of Wasserstein distances on manifolds and graphs. These distances are Hilbert embeddable, allowing us to reduce the distribution collection comparison problem to a more familiar mean testing problem in a Hilbert space. We provide two testing procedures one based on resampling and another on combining p-values from coordinate-wise tests. Our experiments in various synthetic and real data settings show that the resulting tests are powerful and the p-values are well-calibrated. 2 authors · Oct 28, 2020
- Hyperbolic Neural Networks Hyperbolic spaces have recently gained momentum in the context of machine learning due to their high capacity and tree-likeliness properties. However, the representational power of hyperbolic geometry is not yet on par with Euclidean geometry, mostly because of the absence of corresponding hyperbolic neural network layers. This makes it hard to use hyperbolic embeddings in downstream tasks. Here, we bridge this gap in a principled manner by combining the formalism of Möbius gyrovector spaces with the Riemannian geometry of the Poincaré model of hyperbolic spaces. As a result, we derive hyperbolic versions of important deep learning tools: multinomial logistic regression, feed-forward and recurrent neural networks such as gated recurrent units. This allows to embed sequential data and perform classification in the hyperbolic space. Empirically, we show that, even if hyperbolic optimization tools are limited, hyperbolic sentence embeddings either outperform or are on par with their Euclidean variants on textual entailment and noisy-prefix recognition tasks. 3 authors · May 23, 2018
- A Gromov--Wasserstein Geometric View of Spectrum-Preserving Graph Coarsening Graph coarsening is a technique for solving large-scale graph problems by working on a smaller version of the original graph, and possibly interpolating the results back to the original graph. It has a long history in scientific computing and has recently gained popularity in machine learning, particularly in methods that preserve the graph spectrum. This work studies graph coarsening from a different perspective, developing a theory for preserving graph distances and proposing a method to achieve this. The geometric approach is useful when working with a collection of graphs, such as in graph classification and regression. In this study, we consider a graph as an element on a metric space equipped with the Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distance, and bound the difference between the distance of two graphs and their coarsened versions. Minimizing this difference can be done using the popular weighted kernel K-means method, which improves existing spectrum-preserving methods with the proper choice of the kernel. The study includes a set of experiments to support the theory and method, including approximating the GW distance, preserving the graph spectrum, classifying graphs using spectral information, and performing regression using graph convolutional networks. Code is available at https://github.com/ychen-stat-ml/GW-Graph-Coarsening . 4 authors · Jun 15, 2023
- Efficient Graph Field Integrators Meet Point Clouds We present two new classes of algorithms for efficient field integration on graphs encoding point clouds. The first class, SeparatorFactorization(SF), leverages the bounded genus of point cloud mesh graphs, while the second class, RFDiffusion(RFD), uses popular epsilon-nearest-neighbor graph representations for point clouds. Both can be viewed as providing the functionality of Fast Multipole Methods (FMMs), which have had a tremendous impact on efficient integration, but for non-Euclidean spaces. We focus on geometries induced by distributions of walk lengths between points (e.g., shortest-path distance). We provide an extensive theoretical analysis of our algorithms, obtaining new results in structural graph theory as a byproduct. We also perform exhaustive empirical evaluation, including on-surface interpolation for rigid and deformable objects (particularly for mesh-dynamics modeling), Wasserstein distance computations for point clouds, and the Gromov-Wasserstein variant. 16 authors · Feb 2, 2023
- Vietoris--Rips Shadow for Euclidean Graph Reconstruction The shadow of an abstract simplicial complex K with vertices in R^N is a subset of R^N defined as the union of the convex hulls of simplices of K. The Vietoris--Rips complex of a metric space (S,d) at scale β is an abstract simplicial complex whose each k-simplex corresponds to (k+1) points of S within diameter β. In case Ssubsetmathbb R^2 and d(a,b)=|a-b| the standard Euclidean metric, the natural shadow projection of the Vietoris--Rips complex is already proved by Chambers et al. to induce isomorphisms on π_0 and π_1. We extend the result beyond the standard Euclidean distance on Ssubsetmathbb R^N to a family of path-based metrics, d^varepsilon_{S}. From the pairwise Euclidean distances of points in S, we introduce a family (parametrized by varepsilon) of path-based Vietoris--Rips complexes R^varepsilon_β(S) for a scale β>0. If SsubsetR^2 is Hausdorff-close to a planar Euclidean graph G, we provide quantitative bounds on scales β,varepsilon for the shadow projection map of the Vietoris--Rips complex of (S,d^varepsilon_S) at scale β to induce π_1-isomorphism. This paper first studies the homotopy-type recovery of Gsubsetmathbb R^N using the abstract Vietoris--Rips complex of a Hausdorff-close sample S under the d^varepsilon_S metric. Then, our result on the π_1-isomorphism induced by the shadow projection lends itself to providing also a geometrically close embedding for the reconstruction. Based on the length of the shortest loop and large-scale distortion of the embedding of G, we quantify the choice of a suitable sample density varepsilon and a scale β at which the shadow of R^varepsilon_β(S) is homotopy-equivalent and Hausdorff-close to G. 3 authors · Jun 2, 2025
- Synaptic Weight Distributions Depend on the Geometry of Plasticity A growing literature in computational neuroscience leverages gradient descent and learning algorithms that approximate it to study synaptic plasticity in the brain. However, the vast majority of this work ignores a critical underlying assumption: the choice of distance for synaptic changes - i.e. the geometry of synaptic plasticity. Gradient descent assumes that the distance is Euclidean, but many other distances are possible, and there is no reason that biology necessarily uses Euclidean geometry. Here, using the theoretical tools provided by mirror descent, we show that the distribution of synaptic weights will depend on the geometry of synaptic plasticity. We use these results to show that experimentally-observed log-normal weight distributions found in several brain areas are not consistent with standard gradient descent (i.e. a Euclidean geometry), but rather with non-Euclidean distances. Finally, we show that it should be possible to experimentally test for different synaptic geometries by comparing synaptic weight distributions before and after learning. Overall, our work shows that the current paradigm in theoretical work on synaptic plasticity that assumes Euclidean synaptic geometry may be misguided and that it should be possible to experimentally determine the true geometry of synaptic plasticity in the brain. 6 authors · May 30, 2023
1 A geometric framework for asymptotic inference of principal subspaces in PCA In this article, we develop an asymptotic method for constructing confidence regions for the set of all linear subspaces arising from PCA, from which we derive hypothesis tests on this set. Our method is based on the geometry of Riemannian manifolds with which some sets of linear subspaces are endowed. 2 authors · Sep 5, 2022
- Generative Modeling on Manifolds Through Mixture of Riemannian Diffusion Processes Learning the distribution of data on Riemannian manifolds is crucial for modeling data from non-Euclidean space, which is required by many applications in diverse scientific fields. Yet, existing generative models on manifolds suffer from expensive divergence computation or rely on approximations of heat kernel. These limitations restrict their applicability to simple geometries and hinder scalability to high dimensions. In this work, we introduce the Riemannian Diffusion Mixture, a principled framework for building a generative diffusion process on manifolds. Instead of following the denoising approach of previous diffusion models, we construct a diffusion process using a mixture of bridge processes derived on general manifolds without requiring heat kernel estimations. We develop a geometric understanding of the mixture process, deriving the drift as a weighted mean of tangent directions to the data points that guides the process toward the data distribution. We further propose a scalable training objective for learning the mixture process that readily applies to general manifolds. Our method achieves superior performance on diverse manifolds with dramatically reduced number of in-training simulation steps for general manifolds. 2 authors · Oct 11, 2023
- Diffeomorphic Mesh Deformation via Efficient Optimal Transport for Cortical Surface Reconstruction Mesh deformation plays a pivotal role in many 3D vision tasks including dynamic simulations, rendering, and reconstruction. However, defining an efficient discrepancy between predicted and target meshes remains an open problem. A prevalent approach in current deep learning is the set-based approach which measures the discrepancy between two surfaces by comparing two randomly sampled point-clouds from the two meshes with Chamfer pseudo-distance. Nevertheless, the set-based approach still has limitations such as lacking a theoretical guarantee for choosing the number of points in sampled point-clouds, and the pseudo-metricity and the quadratic complexity of the Chamfer divergence. To address these issues, we propose a novel metric for learning mesh deformation. The metric is defined by sliced Wasserstein distance on meshes represented as probability measures that generalize the set-based approach. By leveraging probability measure space, we gain flexibility in encoding meshes using diverse forms of probability measures, such as continuous, empirical, and discrete measures via varifold representation. After having encoded probability measures, we can compare meshes by using the sliced Wasserstein distance which is an effective optimal transport distance with linear computational complexity and can provide a fast statistical rate for approximating the surface of meshes. To the end, we employ a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) to deform the input surface into the target shape by modeling the trajectories of the points on the surface. Our experiments on cortical surface reconstruction demonstrate that our approach surpasses other competing methods in multiple datasets and metrics. 6 authors · May 27, 2023
- Weighting vectors for machine learning: numerical harmonic analysis applied to boundary detection Metric space magnitude, an active field of research in algebraic topology, is a scalar quantity that summarizes the effective number of distinct points that live in a general metric space. The {\em weighting vector} is a closely-related concept that captures, in a nontrivial way, much of the underlying geometry of the original metric space. Recent work has demonstrated that when the metric space is Euclidean, the weighting vector serves as an effective tool for boundary detection. We recast this result and show the weighting vector may be viewed as a solution to a kernelized SVM. As one consequence, we apply this new insight to the task of outlier detection, and we demonstrate performance that is competitive or exceeds performance of state-of-the-art techniques on benchmark data sets. Under mild assumptions, we show the weighting vector, which has computational cost of matrix inversion, can be efficiently approximated in linear time. We show how nearest neighbor methods can approximate solutions to the minimization problems defined by SVMs. 5 authors · Jun 1, 2021
1 Geometry-Aware Generative Autoencoders for Warped Riemannian Metric Learning and Generative Modeling on Data Manifolds Rapid growth of high-dimensional datasets in fields such as single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial genomics has led to unprecedented opportunities for scientific discovery, but it also presents unique computational and statistical challenges. Traditional methods struggle with geometry-aware data generation, interpolation along meaningful trajectories, and transporting populations via feasible paths. To address these issues, we introduce Geometry-Aware Generative Autoencoder (GAGA), a novel framework that combines extensible manifold learning with generative modeling. GAGA constructs a neural network embedding space that respects the intrinsic geometries discovered by manifold learning and learns a novel warped Riemannian metric on the data space. This warped metric is derived from both the points on the data manifold and negative samples off the manifold, allowing it to characterize a meaningful geometry across the entire latent space. Using this metric, GAGA can uniformly sample points on the manifold, generate points along geodesics, and interpolate between populations across the learned manifold using geodesic-guided flows. GAGA shows competitive performance in simulated and real-world datasets, including a 30% improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in single-cell population-level trajectory inference. 10 authors · Oct 16, 2024
1 Geometry of Sample Spaces In statistics, independent, identically distributed random samples do not carry a natural ordering, and their statistics are typically invariant with respect to permutations of their order. Thus, an n-sample in a space M can be considered as an element of the quotient space of M^n modulo the permutation group. The present paper takes this definition of sample space and the related concept of orbit types as a starting point for developing a geometric perspective on statistics. We aim at deriving a general mathematical setting for studying the behavior of empirical and population means in spaces ranging from smooth Riemannian manifolds to general stratified spaces. We fully describe the orbifold and path-metric structure of the sample space when M is a manifold or path-metric space, respectively. These results are non-trivial even when M is Euclidean. We show that the infinite sample space exists in a Gromov-Hausdorff type sense and coincides with the Wasserstein space of probability distributions on M. We exhibit Fr\'echet means and k-means as metric projections onto 1-skeleta or k-skeleta in Wasserstein space, and we define a new and more general notion of polymeans. This geometric characterization via metric projections applies equally to sample and population means, and we use it to establish asymptotic properties of polymeans such as consistency and asymptotic normality. 4 authors · Oct 15, 2020
2 Learning on the Manifold: Unlocking Standard Diffusion Transformers with Representation Encoders Leveraging representation encoders for generative modeling offers a path for efficient, high-fidelity synthesis. However, standard diffusion transformers fail to converge on these representations directly. While recent work attributes this to a capacity bottleneck proposing computationally expensive width scaling of diffusion transformers we demonstrate that the failure is fundamentally geometric. We identify Geometric Interference as the root cause: standard Euclidean flow matching forces probability paths through the low-density interior of the hyperspherical feature space of representation encoders, rather than following the manifold surface. To resolve this, we propose Riemannian Flow Matching with Jacobi Regularization (RJF). By constraining the generative process to the manifold geodesics and correcting for curvature-induced error propagation, RJF enables standard Diffusion Transformer architectures to converge without width scaling. Our method RJF enables the standard DiT-B architecture (131M parameters) to converge effectively, achieving an FID of 3.37 where prior methods fail to converge. Code: https://github.com/amandpkr/RJF Johns Hopkins University · Feb 10 2
- Practical applications of metric space magnitude and weighting vectors Metric space magnitude, an active subject of research in algebraic topology, originally arose in the context of biology, where it was used to represent the effective number of distinct species in an environment. In a more general setting, the magnitude of a metric space is a real number that aims to quantify the effective number of distinct points in the space. The contribution of each point to a metric space's global magnitude, which is encoded by the {\em weighting vector}, captures much of the underlying geometry of the original metric space. Surprisingly, when the metric space is Euclidean, the weighting vector also serves as an effective tool for boundary detection. This allows the weighting vector to serve as the foundation of novel algorithms for classic machine learning tasks such as classification, outlier detection and active learning. We demonstrate, using experiments and comparisons on classic benchmark datasets, the promise of the proposed magnitude and weighting vector-based approaches. 4 authors · Jun 24, 2020
- Hyperbolic Vision Transformers: Combining Improvements in Metric Learning Metric learning aims to learn a highly discriminative model encouraging the embeddings of similar classes to be close in the chosen metrics and pushed apart for dissimilar ones. The common recipe is to use an encoder to extract embeddings and a distance-based loss function to match the representations -- usually, the Euclidean distance is utilized. An emerging interest in learning hyperbolic data embeddings suggests that hyperbolic geometry can be beneficial for natural data. Following this line of work, we propose a new hyperbolic-based model for metric learning. At the core of our method is a vision transformer with output embeddings mapped to hyperbolic space. These embeddings are directly optimized using modified pairwise cross-entropy loss. We evaluate the proposed model with six different formulations on four datasets achieving the new state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/htdt/hyp_metric. 5 authors · Mar 21, 2022
- Theoretical analysis and computation of the sample Frechet mean for sets of large graphs based on spectral information To characterize the location (mean, median) of a set of graphs, one needs a notion of centrality that is adapted to metric spaces, since graph sets are not Euclidean spaces. A standard approach is to consider the Frechet mean. In this work, we equip a set of graphs with the pseudometric defined by the norm between the eigenvalues of their respective adjacency matrix. Unlike the edit distance, this pseudometric reveals structural changes at multiple scales, and is well adapted to studying various statistical problems for graph-valued data. We describe an algorithm to compute an approximation to the sample Frechet mean of a set of undirected unweighted graphs with a fixed size using this pseudometric. 2 authors · Jan 15, 2022
- The Optimiser Hidden in Plain Sight: Training with the Loss Landscape's Induced Metric We present a class of novel optimisers for training neural networks that makes use of the Riemannian metric naturally induced when the loss landscape is embedded in higher-dimensional space. This is the same metric that underlies common visualisations of loss landscapes. By taking this geometric perspective literally and using the induced metric, we develop a new optimiser and compare it to existing methods, namely: SGD, Adam, AdamW, and Muon, across a range of tasks and architectures. Empirically, we conclude that this new class of optimisers is highly effective in low dimensional examples, and provides slight improvement over state-of-the-art methods for training neural networks. These new optimisers have theoretically desirable properties. In particular, the effective learning rate is automatically decreased in regions of high curvature acting as a smoothed out form of gradient clipping. Similarly, one variant of these optimisers can also be viewed as inducing an effective scheduled learning rate and decoupled weight decay is the natural choice from our geometric perspective. The basic method can be used to modify any existing preconditioning method. The new optimiser has a computational complexity comparable to that of Adam. 1 authors · Sep 3, 2025
1 Poincaré Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations Representation learning has become an invaluable approach for learning from symbolic data such as text and graphs. However, while complex symbolic datasets often exhibit a latent hierarchical structure, state-of-the-art methods typically learn embeddings in Euclidean vector spaces, which do not account for this property. For this purpose, we introduce a new approach for learning hierarchical representations of symbolic data by embedding them into hyperbolic space -- or more precisely into an n-dimensional Poincar\'e ball. Due to the underlying hyperbolic geometry, this allows us to learn parsimonious representations of symbolic data by simultaneously capturing hierarchy and similarity. We introduce an efficient algorithm to learn the embeddings based on Riemannian optimization and show experimentally that Poincar\'e embeddings outperform Euclidean embeddings significantly on data with latent hierarchies, both in terms of representation capacity and in terms of generalization ability. 2 authors · May 22, 2017
- Augmented Sliced Wasserstein Distances While theoretically appealing, the application of the Wasserstein distance to large-scale machine learning problems has been hampered by its prohibitive computational cost. The sliced Wasserstein distance and its variants improve the computational efficiency through the random projection, yet they suffer from low accuracy if the number of projections is not sufficiently large, because the majority of projections result in trivially small values. In this work, we propose a new family of distance metrics, called augmented sliced Wasserstein distances (ASWDs), constructed by first mapping samples to higher-dimensional hypersurfaces parameterized by neural networks. It is derived from a key observation that (random) linear projections of samples residing on these hypersurfaces would translate to much more flexible nonlinear projections in the original sample space, so they can capture complex structures of the data distribution. We show that the hypersurfaces can be optimized by gradient ascent efficiently. We provide the condition under which the ASWD is a valid metric and show that this can be obtained by an injective neural network architecture. Numerical results demonstrate that the ASWD significantly outperforms other Wasserstein variants for both synthetic and real-world problems. 3 authors · Jun 15, 2020
- Approximating the Convex Hull via Metric Space Magnitude Magnitude of a finite metric space and the related notion of magnitude functions on metric spaces is an active area of research in algebraic topology. Magnitude originally arose in the context of biology, where it represents the number of effective species in an environment; when applied to a one-parameter family of metric spaces tX with scale parameter t, the magnitude captures much of the underlying geometry of the space. Prior work has mostly focussed on properties of magnitude in a global sense; in this paper we restrict the sets to finite subsets of Euclidean space and investigate its individual components. We give an explicit formula for the corrected inclusion-exclusion principle, and define a quantity associated with each point, called the moment which gives an intrinsic ordering to the points. We exploit this in order to form an algorithm which approximates the convex hull. 3 authors · Aug 7, 2019
1 Incorporating Riemannian Geometric Features for Learning Coefficient of Pressure Distributions on Airplane Wings The aerodynamic coefficients of aircrafts are significantly impacted by its geometry, especially when the angle of attack (AoA) is large. In the field of aerodynamics, traditional polynomial-based parameterization uses as few parameters as possible to describe the geometry of an airfoil. However, because the 3D geometry of a wing is more complicated than the 2D airfoil, polynomial-based parameterizations have difficulty in accurately representing the entire shape of a wing in 3D space. Existing deep learning-based methods can extract massive latent neural representations for the shape of 2D airfoils or 2D slices of wings. Recent studies highlight that directly taking geometric features as inputs to the neural networks can improve the accuracy of predicted aerodynamic coefficients. Motivated by geometry theory, we propose to incorporate Riemannian geometric features for learning Coefficient of Pressure (CP) distributions on wing surfaces. Our method calculates geometric features (Riemannian metric, connection, and curvature) and further inputs the geometric features, coordinates and flight conditions into a deep learning model to predict the CP distribution. Experimental results show that our method, compared to state-of-the-art Deep Attention Network (DAN), reduces the predicted mean square error (MSE) of CP by an average of 8.41% for the DLR-F11 aircraft test set. 4 authors · Dec 22, 2023
- Effective equidistribution of intersection points in hyperbolic manifolds In this paper, we establish effective equidistribution of transverse intersection points between properly immersed totally geodesic submanifolds of complementary dimensions in a finite-volume hyperbolic manifold with respect to the hyperbolic volume measure, as the volume of the submanifolds tends to infinity. 2 authors · Nov 30, 2025
- On weakly Einstein Kähler surfaces Riemannian four-manifolds in which the triple contraction of the curvature tensor against itself yields a functional multiple of the metric are called weakly Einstein. We focus on weakly Einstein K\"ahler surfaces. We provide several conditions characterizing those K\"ahler surfaces which are weakly Einstein, classify weakly Einstein K\"ahler surfaces having some specific additional properties, and construct new examples. 4 authors · Dec 31, 2024
1 Building Neural Networks on Matrix Manifolds: A Gyrovector Space Approach Matrix manifolds, such as manifolds of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices and Grassmann manifolds, appear in many applications. Recently, by applying the theory of gyrogroups and gyrovector spaces that is a powerful framework for studying hyperbolic geometry, some works have attempted to build principled generalizations of Euclidean neural networks on matrix manifolds. However, due to the lack of many concepts in gyrovector spaces for the considered manifolds, e.g., the inner product and gyroangles, techniques and mathematical tools provided by these works are still limited compared to those developed for studying hyperbolic geometry. In this paper, we generalize some notions in gyrovector spaces for SPD and Grassmann manifolds, and propose new models and layers for building neural networks on these manifolds. We show the effectiveness of our approach in two applications, i.e., human action recognition and knowledge graph completion. 2 authors · May 8, 2023
- Decentralized Riemannian Conjugate Gradient Method on the Stiefel Manifold The conjugate gradient method is a crucial first-order optimization method that generally converges faster than the steepest descent method, and its computational cost is much lower than that of second-order methods. However, while various types of conjugate gradient methods have been studied in Euclidean spaces and on Riemannian manifolds, there is little study for those in distributed scenarios. This paper proposes a decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient descent (DRCGD) method that aims at minimizing a global function over the Stiefel manifold. The optimization problem is distributed among a network of agents, where each agent is associated with a local function, and the communication between agents occurs over an undirected connected graph. Since the Stiefel manifold is a non-convex set, a global function is represented as a finite sum of possibly non-convex (but smooth) local functions. The proposed method is free from expensive Riemannian geometric operations such as retractions, exponential maps, and vector transports, thereby reducing the computational complexity required by each agent. To the best of our knowledge, DRCGD is the first decentralized Riemannian conjugate gradient algorithm to achieve global convergence over the Stiefel manifold. 7 authors · Aug 21, 2023
1 Geometry on the Wasserstein space over a compact Riemannian manifold We will revisit the intrinsic differential geometry of the Wasserstein space over a Riemannian manifold, due to a series of papers by Otto, Villani, Lott, Ambrosio, Gigli, Savar\'e and so on. 2 authors · Apr 2, 2021
- Input Convex Gradient Networks The gradients of convex functions are expressive models of non-trivial vector fields. For example, Brenier's theorem yields that the optimal transport map between any two measures on Euclidean space under the squared distance is realized as a convex gradient, which is a key insight used in recent generative flow models. In this paper, we study how to model convex gradients by integrating a Jacobian-vector product parameterized by a neural network, which we call the Input Convex Gradient Network (ICGN). We theoretically study ICGNs and compare them to taking the gradient of an Input-Convex Neural Network (ICNN), empirically demonstrating that a single layer ICGN can fit a toy example better than a single layer ICNN. Lastly, we explore extensions to deeper networks and connections to constructions from Riemannian geometry. 3 authors · Nov 23, 2021
2 Manifold Diffusion Fields We present Manifold Diffusion Fields (MDF), an approach to learn generative models of continuous functions defined over Riemannian manifolds. Leveraging insights from spectral geometry analysis, we define an intrinsic coordinate system on the manifold via the eigen-functions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator. MDF represents functions using an explicit parametrization formed by a set of multiple input-output pairs. Our approach allows to sample continuous functions on manifolds and is invariant with respect to rigid and isometric transformations of the manifold. Empirical results on several datasets and manifolds show that MDF can capture distributions of such functions with better diversity and fidelity than previous approaches. 3 authors · May 24, 2023
1 Representation Tradeoffs for Hyperbolic Embeddings Hyperbolic embeddings offer excellent quality with few dimensions when embedding hierarchical data structures like synonym or type hierarchies. Given a tree, we give a combinatorial construction that embeds the tree in hyperbolic space with arbitrarily low distortion without using optimization. On WordNet, our combinatorial embedding obtains a mean-average-precision of 0.989 with only two dimensions, while Nickel et al.'s recent construction obtains 0.87 using 200 dimensions. We provide upper and lower bounds that allow us to characterize the precision-dimensionality tradeoff inherent in any hyperbolic embedding. To embed general metric spaces, we propose a hyperbolic generalization of multidimensional scaling (h-MDS). We show how to perform exact recovery of hyperbolic points from distances, provide a perturbation analysis, and give a recovery result that allows us to reduce dimensionality. The h-MDS approach offers consistently low distortion even with few dimensions across several datasets. Finally, we extract lessons from the algorithms and theory above to design a PyTorch-based implementation that can handle incomplete information and is scalable. 4 authors · Apr 9, 2018
- Nonlinear Sufficient Dimension Reduction for Distribution-on-Distribution Regression We introduce a new approach to nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction in cases where both the predictor and the response are distributional data, modeled as members of a metric space. Our key step is to build universal kernels (cc-universal) on the metric spaces, which results in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces for the predictor and response that are rich enough to characterize the conditional independence that determines sufficient dimension reduction. For univariate distributions, we construct the universal kernel using the Wasserstein distance, while for multivariate distributions, we resort to the sliced Wasserstein distance. The sliced Wasserstein distance ensures that the metric space possesses similar topological properties to the Wasserstein space while also offering significant computation benefits. Numerical results based on synthetic data show that our method outperforms possible competing methods. The method is also applied to several data sets, including fertility and mortality data and Calgary temperature data. 3 authors · Jul 11, 2022
1 Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs We present a new approach for the approximate K-nearest neighbor search based on navigable small world graphs with controllable hierarchy (Hierarchical NSW, HNSW). The proposed solution is fully graph-based, without any need for additional search structures, which are typically used at the coarse search stage of the most proximity graph techniques. Hierarchical NSW incrementally builds a multi-layer structure consisting from hierarchical set of proximity graphs (layers) for nested subsets of the stored elements. The maximum layer in which an element is present is selected randomly with an exponentially decaying probability distribution. This allows producing graphs similar to the previously studied Navigable Small World (NSW) structures while additionally having the links separated by their characteristic distance scales. Starting search from the upper layer together with utilizing the scale separation boosts the performance compared to NSW and allows a logarithmic complexity scaling. Additional employment of a heuristic for selecting proximity graph neighbors significantly increases performance at high recall and in case of highly clustered data. Performance evaluation has demonstrated that the proposed general metric space search index is able to strongly outperform previous opensource state-of-the-art vector-only approaches. Similarity of the algorithm to the skip list structure allows straightforward balanced distributed implementation. 2 authors · Mar 30, 2016
- Project and Forget: Solving Large-Scale Metric Constrained Problems Given a set of dissimilarity measurements amongst data points, determining what metric representation is most "consistent" with the input measurements or the metric that best captures the relevant geometric features of the data is a key step in many machine learning algorithms. Existing methods are restricted to specific kinds of metrics or small problem sizes because of the large number of metric constraints in such problems. In this paper, we provide an active set algorithm, Project and Forget, that uses Bregman projections, to solve metric constrained problems with many (possibly exponentially) inequality constraints. We provide a theoretical analysis of Project and Forget and prove that our algorithm converges to the global optimal solution and that the L_2 distance of the current iterate to the optimal solution decays asymptotically at an exponential rate. We demonstrate that using our method we can solve large problem instances of three types of metric constrained problems: general weight correlation clustering, metric nearness, and metric learning; in each case, out-performing the state of the art methods with respect to CPU times and problem sizes. 2 authors · May 8, 2020
- Representational dissimilarity metric spaces for stochastic neural networks Quantifying similarity between neural representations -- e.g. hidden layer activation vectors -- is a perennial problem in deep learning and neuroscience research. Existing methods compare deterministic responses (e.g. artificial networks that lack stochastic layers) or averaged responses (e.g., trial-averaged firing rates in biological data). However, these measures of _deterministic_ representational similarity ignore the scale and geometric structure of noise, both of which play important roles in neural computation. To rectify this, we generalize previously proposed shape metrics (Williams et al. 2021) to quantify differences in _stochastic_ representations. These new distances satisfy the triangle inequality, and thus can be used as a rigorous basis for many supervised and unsupervised analyses. Leveraging this novel framework, we find that the stochastic geometries of neurobiological representations of oriented visual gratings and naturalistic scenes respectively resemble untrained and trained deep network representations. Further, we are able to more accurately predict certain network attributes (e.g. training hyperparameters) from its position in stochastic (versus deterministic) shape space. 6 authors · Nov 21, 2022
- The Numerical Stability of Hyperbolic Representation Learning Given the exponential growth of the volume of the ball w.r.t. its radius, the hyperbolic space is capable of embedding trees with arbitrarily small distortion and hence has received wide attention for representing hierarchical datasets. However, this exponential growth property comes at a price of numerical instability such that training hyperbolic learning models will sometimes lead to catastrophic NaN problems, encountering unrepresentable values in floating point arithmetic. In this work, we carefully analyze the limitation of two popular models for the hyperbolic space, namely, the Poincar\'e ball and the Lorentz model. We first show that, under the 64 bit arithmetic system, the Poincar\'e ball has a relatively larger capacity than the Lorentz model for correctly representing points. Then, we theoretically validate the superiority of the Lorentz model over the Poincar\'e ball from the perspective of optimization. Given the numerical limitations of both models, we identify one Euclidean parametrization of the hyperbolic space which can alleviate these limitations. We further extend this Euclidean parametrization to hyperbolic hyperplanes and exhibits its ability in improving the performance of hyperbolic SVM. 4 authors · Oct 31, 2022
- On Generalizations of Some Distance Based Classifiers for HDLSS Data In high dimension, low sample size (HDLSS) settings, classifiers based on Euclidean distances like the nearest neighbor classifier and the average distance classifier perform quite poorly if differences between locations of the underlying populations get masked by scale differences. To rectify this problem, several modifications of these classifiers have been proposed in the literature. However, existing methods are confined to location and scale differences only, and often fail to discriminate among populations differing outside of the first two moments. In this article, we propose some simple transformations of these classifiers resulting into improved performance even when the underlying populations have the same location and scale. We further propose a generalization of these classifiers based on the idea of grouping of variables. The high-dimensional behavior of the proposed classifiers is studied theoretically. Numerical experiments with a variety of simulated examples as well as an extensive analysis of real data sets exhibit advantages of the proposed methods. 4 authors · Feb 8, 2019
- Sheaf Neural Networks with Connection Laplacians A Sheaf Neural Network (SNN) is a type of Graph Neural Network (GNN) that operates on a sheaf, an object that equips a graph with vector spaces over its nodes and edges and linear maps between these spaces. SNNs have been shown to have useful theoretical properties that help tackle issues arising from heterophily and over-smoothing. One complication intrinsic to these models is finding a good sheaf for the task to be solved. Previous works proposed two diametrically opposed approaches: manually constructing the sheaf based on domain knowledge and learning the sheaf end-to-end using gradient-based methods. However, domain knowledge is often insufficient, while learning a sheaf could lead to overfitting and significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose a novel way of computing sheaves drawing inspiration from Riemannian geometry: we leverage the manifold assumption to compute manifold-and-graph-aware orthogonal maps, which optimally align the tangent spaces of neighbouring data points. We show that this approach achieves promising results with less computational overhead when compared to previous SNN models. Overall, this work provides an interesting connection between algebraic topology and differential geometry, and we hope that it will spark future research in this direction. 6 authors · Jun 17, 2022
1 Manifold Learning by Mixture Models of VAEs for Inverse Problems Representing a manifold of very high-dimensional data with generative models has been shown to be computationally efficient in practice. However, this requires that the data manifold admits a global parameterization. In order to represent manifolds of arbitrary topology, we propose to learn a mixture model of variational autoencoders. Here, every encoder-decoder pair represents one chart of a manifold. We propose a loss function for maximum likelihood estimation of the model weights and choose an architecture that provides us the analytical expression of the charts and of their inverses. Once the manifold is learned, we use it for solving inverse problems by minimizing a data fidelity term restricted to the learned manifold. To solve the arising minimization problem we propose a Riemannian gradient descent algorithm on the learned manifold. We demonstrate the performance of our method for low-dimensional toy examples as well as for deblurring and electrical impedance tomography on certain image manifolds. 4 authors · Mar 27, 2023
- Metric Flow Matching for Smooth Interpolations on the Data Manifold Matching objectives underpin the success of modern generative models and rely on constructing conditional paths that transform a source distribution into a target distribution. Despite being a fundamental building block, conditional paths have been designed principally under the assumption of Euclidean geometry, resulting in straight interpolations. However, this can be particularly restrictive for tasks such as trajectory inference, where straight paths might lie outside the data manifold, thus failing to capture the underlying dynamics giving rise to the observed marginals. In this paper, we propose Metric Flow Matching (MFM), a novel simulation-free framework for conditional flow matching where interpolants are approximate geodesics learned by minimizing the kinetic energy of a data-induced Riemannian metric. This way, the generative model matches vector fields on the data manifold, which corresponds to lower uncertainty and more meaningful interpolations. We prescribe general metrics to instantiate MFM, independent of the task, and test it on a suite of challenging problems including LiDAR navigation, unpaired image translation, and modeling cellular dynamics. We observe that MFM outperforms the Euclidean baselines, particularly achieving SOTA on single-cell trajectory prediction. 8 authors · May 23, 2024
- Get the Best of Both Worlds: Improving Accuracy and Transferability by Grassmann Class Representation We generalize the class vectors found in neural networks to linear subspaces (i.e.~points in the Grassmann manifold) and show that the Grassmann Class Representation (GCR) enables the simultaneous improvement in accuracy and feature transferability. In GCR, each class is a subspace and the logit is defined as the norm of the projection of a feature onto the class subspace. We integrate Riemannian SGD into deep learning frameworks such that class subspaces in a Grassmannian are jointly optimized with the rest model parameters. Compared to the vector form, the representative capability of subspaces is more powerful. We show that on ImageNet-1K, the top-1 error of ResNet50-D, ResNeXt50, Swin-T and Deit3-S are reduced by 5.6%, 4.5%, 3.0% and 3.5%, respectively. Subspaces also provide freedom for features to vary and we observed that the intra-class feature variability grows when the subspace dimension increases. Consequently, we found the quality of GCR features is better for downstream tasks. For ResNet50-D, the average linear transfer accuracy across 6 datasets improves from 77.98% to 79.70% compared to the strong baseline of vanilla softmax. For Swin-T, it improves from 81.5% to 83.4% and for Deit3, it improves from 73.8% to 81.4%. With these encouraging results, we believe that more applications could benefit from the Grassmann class representation. Code is released at https://github.com/innerlee/GCR. 3 authors · Aug 3, 2023
- Implicit Gaussian process representation of vector fields over arbitrary latent manifolds Gaussian processes (GPs) are popular nonparametric statistical models for learning unknown functions and quantifying the spatiotemporal uncertainty in data. Recent works have extended GPs to model scalar and vector quantities distributed over non-Euclidean domains, including smooth manifolds appearing in numerous fields such as computer vision, dynamical systems, and neuroscience. However, these approaches assume that the manifold underlying the data is known, limiting their practical utility. We introduce RVGP, a generalisation of GPs for learning vector signals over latent Riemannian manifolds. Our method uses positional encoding with eigenfunctions of the connection Laplacian, associated with the tangent bundle, readily derived from common graph-based approximation of data. We demonstrate that RVGP possesses global regularity over the manifold, which allows it to super-resolve and inpaint vector fields while preserving singularities. Furthermore, we use RVGP to reconstruct high-density neural dynamics derived from low-density EEG recordings in healthy individuals and Alzheimer's patients. We show that vector field singularities are important disease markers and that their reconstruction leads to a comparable classification accuracy of disease states to high-density recordings. Thus, our method overcomes a significant practical limitation in experimental and clinical applications. 9 authors · Sep 28, 2023
- Compact Einstein-type manifolds with parallel Ricci tensor In this paper, we deduce a Bochner-type identity for compact gradient Einstein-type manifolds with boundary. As consequence, we are able to show a rigidity result for Einstein-type manifolds assuming the parallel Ricci curvature condition. Moreover, we provide a condition on the norm of the gradient of the potential function in order to classify such structures. 3 authors · Mar 4, 2024
- Dynamic Hyperbolic Attention Network for Fine Hand-object Reconstruction Reconstructing both objects and hands in 3D from a single RGB image is complex. Existing methods rely on manually defined hand-object constraints in Euclidean space, leading to suboptimal feature learning. Compared with Euclidean space, hyperbolic space better preserves the geometric properties of meshes thanks to its exponentially-growing space distance, which amplifies the differences between the features based on similarity. In this work, we propose the first precise hand-object reconstruction method in hyperbolic space, namely Dynamic Hyperbolic Attention Network (DHANet), which leverages intrinsic properties of hyperbolic space to learn representative features. Our method that projects mesh and image features into a unified hyperbolic space includes two modules, ie. dynamic hyperbolic graph convolution and image-attention hyperbolic graph convolution. With these two modules, our method learns mesh features with rich geometry-image multi-modal information and models better hand-object interaction. Our method provides a promising alternative for fine hand-object reconstruction in hyperbolic space. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most state-of-the-art methods. 9 authors · Sep 6, 2023
- Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder for Inductive Transfer in Regression Tasks Transfer learning is a crucial technique for handling a small amount of data that is potentially related to other abundant data. However, most of the existing methods are focused on classification tasks using images and language datasets. Therefore, in order to expand the transfer learning scheme to regression tasks, we propose a novel transfer technique based on differential geometry, namely the Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder (GATE). In this method, we interpret the latent vectors from the model to exist on a Riemannian curved manifold. We find a proper diffeomorphism between pairs of tasks to ensure that every arbitrary point maps to a locally flat coordinate in the overlapping region, allowing the transfer of knowledge from the source to the target data. This also serves as an effective regularizer for the model to behave in extrapolation regions. In this article, we demonstrate that GATE outperforms conventional methods and exhibits stable behavior in both the latent space and extrapolation regions for various molecular graph datasets. 5 authors · Oct 10, 2023
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio: A Robust Distance Metric for Deep Metric Learning Deep metric learning, which learns discriminative features to process image clustering and retrieval tasks, has attracted extensive attention in recent years. A number of deep metric learning methods, which ensure that similar examples are mapped close to each other and dissimilar examples are mapped farther apart, have been proposed to construct effective structures for loss functions and have shown promising results. In this paper, different from the approaches on learning the loss structures, we propose a robust SNR distance metric based on Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for measuring the similarity of image pairs for deep metric learning. By exploring the properties of our SNR distance metric from the view of geometry space and statistical theory, we analyze the properties of our metric and show that it can preserve the semantic similarity between image pairs, which well justify its suitability for deep metric learning. Compared with Euclidean distance metric, our SNR distance metric can further jointly reduce the intra-class distances and enlarge the inter-class distances for learned features. Leveraging our SNR distance metric, we propose Deep SNR-based Metric Learning (DSML) to generate discriminative feature embeddings. By extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, including CARS196, CUB200-2011 and CIFAR10, our DSML has shown its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we extend our SNR distance metric to deep hashing learning, and conduct experiments on two benchmarks, including CIFAR10 and NUS-WIDE, to demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our SNR distance metric. 5 authors · Apr 4, 2019
1 GriSPy: A Python package for Fixed-Radius Nearest Neighbors Search We present a new regular grid search algorithm for quick fixed-radius nearest-neighbor lookup developed in Python. This module indexes a set of k-dimensional points in a regular grid, with optional periodic conditions, providing a fast approach for nearest neighbors queries. In this first installment we provide three types of queries: bubble, shell and the nth-nearest; as well as three different metrics of interest in astronomy: the euclidean and two distance functions in spherical coordinates of varying precision, haversine and Vincenty; and the possibility of providing a custom distance function. This package results particularly useful for large datasets where a brute-force search turns impractical. 7 authors · Dec 19, 2019
- Estimating Shape Distances on Neural Representations with Limited Samples Measuring geometric similarity between high-dimensional network representations is a topic of longstanding interest to neuroscience and deep learning. Although many methods have been proposed, only a few works have rigorously analyzed their statistical efficiency or quantified estimator uncertainty in data-limited regimes. Here, we derive upper and lower bounds on the worst-case convergence of standard estimators of shape distancex2014a measure of representational dissimilarity proposed by Williams et al. (2021).These bounds reveal the challenging nature of the problem in high-dimensional feature spaces. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new method-of-moments estimator with a tunable bias-variance tradeoff. We show that this estimator achieves substantially lower bias than standard estimators in simulation and on neural data, particularly in high-dimensional settings. Thus, we lay the foundation for a rigorous statistical theory for high-dimensional shape analysis, and we contribute a new estimation method that is well-suited to practical scientific settings. 4 authors · Oct 9, 2023
- Reachability-Aware Laplacian Representation in Reinforcement Learning In Reinforcement Learning (RL), Laplacian Representation (LapRep) is a task-agnostic state representation that encodes the geometry of the environment. A desirable property of LapRep stated in prior works is that the Euclidean distance in the LapRep space roughly reflects the reachability between states, which motivates the usage of this distance for reward shaping. However, we find that LapRep does not necessarily have this property in general: two states having small distance under LapRep can actually be far away in the environment. Such mismatch would impede the learning process in reward shaping. To fix this issue, we introduce a Reachability-Aware Laplacian Representation (RA-LapRep), by properly scaling each dimension of LapRep. Despite the simplicity, we demonstrate that RA-LapRep can better capture the inter-state reachability as compared to LapRep, through both theoretical explanations and experimental results. Additionally, we show that this improvement yields a significant boost in reward shaping performance and also benefits bottleneck state discovery. 5 authors · Oct 24, 2022
- Molecule3D: A Benchmark for Predicting 3D Geometries from Molecular Graphs Graph neural networks are emerging as promising methods for modeling molecular graphs, in which nodes and edges correspond to atoms and chemical bonds, respectively. Recent studies show that when 3D molecular geometries, such as bond lengths and angles, are available, molecular property prediction tasks can be made more accurate. However, computing of 3D molecular geometries requires quantum calculations that are computationally prohibitive. For example, accurate calculation of 3D geometries of a small molecule requires hours of computing time using density functional theory (DFT). Here, we propose to predict the ground-state 3D geometries from molecular graphs using machine learning methods. To make this feasible, we develop a benchmark, known as Molecule3D, that includes a dataset with precise ground-state geometries of approximately 4 million molecules derived from DFT. We also provide a set of software tools for data processing, splitting, training, and evaluation, etc. Specifically, we propose to assess the error and validity of predicted geometries using four metrics. We implement two baseline methods that either predict the pairwise distance between atoms or atom coordinates in 3D space. Experimental results show that, compared with generating 3D geometries with RDKit, our method can achieve comparable prediction accuracy but with much smaller computational costs. Our Molecule3D is available as a module of the MoleculeX software library (https://github.com/divelab/MoleculeX). 10 authors · Sep 30, 2021
1 Manifold Characteristics That Predict Downstream Task Performance Pretraining methods are typically compared by evaluating the accuracy of linear classifiers, transfer learning performance, or visually inspecting the representation manifold's (RM) lower-dimensional projections. We show that the differences between methods can be understood more clearly by investigating the RM directly, which allows for a more detailed comparison. To this end, we propose a framework and new metric to measure and compare different RMs. We also investigate and report on the RM characteristics for various pretraining methods. These characteristics are measured by applying sequentially larger local alterations to the input data, using white noise injections and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversarial attacks, and then tracking each datapoint. We calculate the total distance moved for each datapoint and the relative change in distance between successive alterations. We show that self-supervised methods learn an RM where alterations lead to large but constant size changes, indicating a smoother RM than fully supervised methods. We then combine these measurements into one metric, the Representation Manifold Quality Metric (RMQM), where larger values indicate larger and less variable step sizes, and show that RMQM correlates positively with performance on downstream tasks. 3 authors · May 16, 2022
- Harmonizing Geometry and Uncertainty: Diffusion with Hyperspheres Do contemporary diffusion models preserve the class geometry of hyperspherical data? Standard diffusion models rely on isotropic Gaussian noise in the forward process, inherently favoring Euclidean spaces. However, many real-world problems involve non-Euclidean distributions, such as hyperspherical manifolds, where class-specific patterns are governed by angular geometry within hypercones. When modeled in Euclidean space, these angular subtleties are lost, leading to suboptimal generative performance. To address this limitation, we introduce HyperSphereDiff to align hyperspherical structures with directional noise, preserving class geometry and effectively capturing angular uncertainty. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this approach aligns the generative process with the intrinsic geometry of hyperspherical data, resulting in more accurate and geometry-aware generative models. We evaluate our framework on four object datasets and two face datasets, showing that incorporating angular uncertainty better preserves the underlying hyperspherical manifold. Resources are available at: {https://github.com/IAB-IITJ/Harmonizing-Geometry-and-Uncertainty-Diffusion-with-Hyperspheres/} 5 authors · Jun 12, 2025
- Do logarithmic proximity measures outperform plain ones in graph clustering? We consider a number of graph kernels and proximity measures including commute time kernel, regularized Laplacian kernel, heat kernel, exponential diffusion kernel (also called "communicability"), etc., and the corresponding distances as applied to clustering nodes in random graphs and several well-known datasets. The model of generating random graphs involves edge probabilities for the pairs of nodes that belong to the same class or different predefined classes of nodes. It turns out that in most cases, logarithmic measures (i.e., measures resulting after taking logarithm of the proximities) perform better while distinguishing underlying classes than the "plain" measures. A comparison in terms of reject curves of inter-class and intra-class distances confirms this conclusion. A similar conclusion can be made for several well-known datasets. A possible origin of this effect is that most kernels have a multiplicative nature, while the nature of distances used in cluster algorithms is an additive one (cf. the triangle inequality). The logarithmic transformation is a tool to transform the first nature to the second one. Moreover, some distances corresponding to the logarithmic measures possess a meaningful cutpoint additivity property. In our experiments, the leader is usually the logarithmic Communicability measure. However, we indicate some more complicated cases in which other measures, typically, Communicability and plain Walk, can be the winners. 2 authors · May 3, 2016
- CADmium: Fine-Tuning Code Language Models for Text-Driven Sequential CAD Design Computer-aided design (CAD) is the digital construction of 2D and 3D objects, and is central to a wide range of engineering and manufacturing applications like automobile and aviation. Despite its importance, CAD modeling remains largely a time-intensive, manual task. Recent works have attempted to automate this process with small transformer-based models and handcrafted CAD sequence representations. However, there has been little effort to leverage the potential of large language models (LLMs) for sequential CAD design. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale dataset of more than 170k CAD models annotated with high-quality, human-like descriptions generated with our pipeline based on GPT-4.1. Using this dataset, we fine-tune powerful code-LLMs to generate CAD sequences represented in a JSON-based format from natural language descriptions, demonstrating the viability and effectiveness of this approach for text-conditioned CAD generation. Because simple metrics often fail to reflect the quality of generated objects, we introduce geometric and topological metrics based on sphericity, mean curvature, and Euler characteristic to provide richer structural insights. Our experiments and ablation studies on both synthetic and human-annotated data demonstrate that CADmium is able to automate CAD design, drastically speeding up the design of new objects. The dataset, code, and fine-tuned models are available online. 5 authors · Jul 13, 2025
- Exploring the Manifold of Neural Networks Using Diffusion Geometry Drawing motivation from the manifold hypothesis, which posits that most high-dimensional data lies on or near low-dimensional manifolds, we apply manifold learning to the space of neural networks. We learn manifolds where datapoints are neural networks by introducing a distance between the hidden layer representations of the neural networks. These distances are then fed to the non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm PHATE to create a manifold of neural networks. We characterize this manifold using features of the representation, including class separation, hierarchical cluster structure, spectral entropy, and topological structure. Our analysis reveals that high-performing networks cluster together in the manifold, displaying consistent embedding patterns across all these features. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this approach for guiding hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search by sampling from the manifold. 15 authors · Nov 19, 2024
- GSSF: Generalized Structural Sparse Function for Deep Cross-modal Metric Learning Cross-modal metric learning is a prominent research topic that bridges the semantic heterogeneity between vision and language. Existing methods frequently utilize simple cosine or complex distance metrics to transform the pairwise features into a similarity score, which suffers from an inadequate or inefficient capability for distance measurements. Consequently, we propose a Generalized Structural Sparse Function to dynamically capture thorough and powerful relationships across modalities for pair-wise similarity learning while remaining concise but efficient. Specifically, the distance metric delicately encapsulates two formats of diagonal and block-diagonal terms, automatically distinguishing and highlighting the cross-channel relevancy and dependency inside a structured and organized topology. Hence, it thereby empowers itself to adapt to the optimal matching patterns between the paired features and reaches a sweet spot between model complexity and capability. Extensive experiments on cross-modal and two extra uni-modal retrieval tasks (image-text retrieval, person re-identification, fine-grained image retrieval) have validated its superiority and flexibility over various popular retrieval frameworks. More importantly, we further discover that it can be seamlessly incorporated into multiple application scenarios, and demonstrates promising prospects from Attention Mechanism to Knowledge Distillation in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/GSSF. 6 authors · Oct 19, 2024
- First Integrals of Geodesic Flows on Cones In this paper we study the behavior of geodesics on cones over arbitrary C^3-smooth closed Riemannian manifolds. We show that the geodesic flow on such cones admits first integrals whose values uniquely determine almost all geodesics except for cone generatrices. This investigation is inspired by our results on billiards inside cones over manifolds where similar results hold true. 2 authors · Nov 3, 2025
10 Einstein Fields: A Neural Perspective To Computational General Relativity We introduce Einstein Fields, a neural representation that is designed to compress computationally intensive four-dimensional numerical relativity simulations into compact implicit neural network weights. By modeling the metric, which is the core tensor field of general relativity, Einstein Fields enable the derivation of physical quantities via automatic differentiation. However, unlike conventional neural fields (e.g., signed distance, occupancy, or radiance fields), Einstein Fields are Neural Tensor Fields with the key difference that when encoding the spacetime geometry of general relativity into neural field representations, dynamics emerge naturally as a byproduct. Einstein Fields show remarkable potential, including continuum modeling of 4D spacetime, mesh-agnosticity, storage efficiency, derivative accuracy, and ease of use. We address these challenges across several canonical test beds of general relativity and release an open source JAX-based library, paving the way for more scalable and expressive approaches to numerical relativity. Code is made available at https://github.com/AndreiB137/EinFields 4 authors · Jul 15, 2025 1
- Functorial Manifold Learning We adapt previous research on category theory and topological unsupervised learning to develop a functorial perspective on manifold learning, also known as nonlinear dimensionality reduction. We first characterize manifold learning algorithms as functors that map pseudometric spaces to optimization objectives and that factor through hierarchical clustering functors. We then use this characterization to prove refinement bounds on manifold learning loss functions and construct a hierarchy of manifold learning algorithms based on their equivariants. We express several popular manifold learning algorithms as functors at different levels of this hierarchy, including Metric Multidimensional Scaling, IsoMap, and UMAP. Next, we use interleaving distance to study the stability of a broad class of manifold learning algorithms. We present bounds on how closely the embeddings these algorithms produce from noisy data approximate the embeddings they would learn from noiseless data. Finally, we use our framework to derive a set of novel manifold learning algorithms, which we experimentally demonstrate are competitive with the state of the art. 1 authors · Nov 14, 2020
- A Geometric Perspective on Variational Autoencoders This paper introduces a new interpretation of the Variational Autoencoder framework by taking a fully geometric point of view. We argue that vanilla VAE models unveil naturally a Riemannian structure in their latent space and that taking into consideration those geometrical aspects can lead to better interpolations and an improved generation procedure. This new proposed sampling method consists in sampling from the uniform distribution deriving intrinsically from the learned Riemannian latent space and we show that using this scheme can make a vanilla VAE competitive and even better than more advanced versions on several benchmark datasets. Since generative models are known to be sensitive to the number of training samples we also stress the method's robustness in the low data regime. 2 authors · Sep 15, 2022
2 PolyGraph Discrepancy: a classifier-based metric for graph generation Existing methods for evaluating graph generative models primarily rely on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) metrics based on graph descriptors. While these metrics can rank generative models, they do not provide an absolute measure of performance. Their values are also highly sensitive to extrinsic parameters, namely kernel and descriptor parametrization, making them incomparable across different graph descriptors. We introduce PolyGraph Discrepancy (PGD), a new evaluation framework that addresses these limitations. It approximates the Jensen-Shannon distance of graph distributions by fitting binary classifiers to distinguish between real and generated graphs, featurized by these descriptors. The data log-likelihood of these classifiers approximates a variational lower bound on the JS distance between the two distributions. Resulting metrics are constrained to the unit interval [0,1] and are comparable across different graph descriptors. We further derive a theoretically grounded summary metric that combines these individual metrics to provide a maximally tight lower bound on the distance for the given descriptors. Thorough experiments demonstrate that PGD provides a more robust and insightful evaluation compared to MMD metrics. The PolyGraph framework for benchmarking graph generative models is made publicly available at https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/polygraph-benchmark. 4 authors · Oct 7, 2025
- On Space Folds of ReLU Neural Networks Recent findings suggest that the consecutive layers of ReLU neural networks can be understood geometrically as space folding transformations of the input space, revealing patterns of self-similarity. In this paper, we present the first quantitative analysis of this space folding phenomenon in ReLU neural networks. Our approach focuses on examining how straight paths in the Euclidean input space are mapped to their counterparts in the Hamming activation space. In this process, the convexity of straight lines is generally lost, giving rise to non-convex folding behavior. To quantify this effect, we introduce a novel measure based on range metrics, similar to those used in the study of random walks, and provide the proof for the equivalence of convexity notions between the input and activation spaces. Furthermore, we provide empirical analysis on a geometrical analysis benchmark (CantorNet) as well as an image classification benchmark (MNIST). Our work advances the understanding of the activation space in ReLU neural networks by leveraging the phenomena of geometric folding, providing valuable insights on how these models process input information. 5 authors · Feb 14, 2025
- Spectral Sufficient Conditions for Graph Factors The {K_{1,1}, K_{1,2},C_m: mgeq3}-factor of a graph is a spanning subgraph whose each component is an element of {K_{1,1}, K_{1,2},C_m: mgeq3}. In this paper, through the graph spectral methods, we establish the lower bound of the signless Laplacian spectral radius and the upper bound of the distance spectral radius to determine whether a graph admits a {K_2}-factor. We get a lower bound on the size (resp. the spectral radius) of G to guarantee that G contains a {K_{1,1}, K_{1,2},C_m: mgeq3}-factor. Then we determine an upper bound on the distance spectral radius of G to ensure that G has a {K_{1,1}, K_{1,2},C_m: mgeq3}-factor. Furthermore, by constructing extremal graphs, we show that the above all bounds are best possible. 3 authors · Feb 1, 2025
- Geometric Neural Operators (GNPs) for Data-Driven Deep Learning of Non-Euclidean Operators We introduce Geometric Neural Operators (GNPs) for accounting for geometric contributions in data-driven deep learning of operators. We show how GNPs can be used (i) to estimate geometric properties, such as the metric and curvatures, (ii) to approximate Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on manifolds, (iii) learn solution maps for Laplace-Beltrami (LB) operators, and (iv) to solve Bayesian inverse problems for identifying manifold shapes. The methods allow for handling geometries of general shape including point-cloud representations. The developed GNPs provide approaches for incorporating the roles of geometry in data-driven learning of operators. 2 authors · Apr 16, 2024
- Critical Points and Convergence Analysis of Generative Deep Linear Networks Trained with Bures-Wasserstein Loss We consider a deep matrix factorization model of covariance matrices trained with the Bures-Wasserstein distance. While recent works have made important advances in the study of the optimization problem for overparametrized low-rank matrix approximation, much emphasis has been placed on discriminative settings and the square loss. In contrast, our model considers another interesting type of loss and connects with the generative setting. We characterize the critical points and minimizers of the Bures-Wasserstein distance over the space of rank-bounded matrices. For low-rank matrices the Hessian of this loss can theoretically blow up, which creates challenges to analyze convergence of optimizaton methods. We establish convergence results for gradient flow using a smooth perturbative version of the loss and convergence results for finite step size gradient descent under certain assumptions on the initial weights. 4 authors · Mar 6, 2023
- There are no geodesic hubs in the Brownian sphere A point of a metric space is called a k-hub if it is the endpoint of exactly k disjoint geodesics, and that the concatenation of any two of these paths is still a geodesic. We prove that in the Brownian sphere, there is no k-hub for kgeq 3. 1 authors · Jan 5, 2025
- A picture of the space of typical learnable tasks We develop information geometric techniques to understand the representations learned by deep networks when they are trained on different tasks using supervised, meta-, semi-supervised and contrastive learning. We shed light on the following phenomena that relate to the structure of the space of tasks: (1) the manifold of probabilistic models trained on different tasks using different representation learning methods is effectively low-dimensional; (2) supervised learning on one task results in a surprising amount of progress even on seemingly dissimilar tasks; progress on other tasks is larger if the training task has diverse classes; (3) the structure of the space of tasks indicated by our analysis is consistent with parts of the Wordnet phylogenetic tree; (4) episodic meta-learning algorithms and supervised learning traverse different trajectories during training but they fit similar models eventually; (5) contrastive and semi-supervised learning methods traverse trajectories similar to those of supervised learning. We use classification tasks constructed from the CIFAR-10 and Imagenet datasets to study these phenomena. 8 authors · Oct 30, 2022
- A multiplicative inequality of Riesz transform type on general Riemannian manifolds Given any complete Riemannian manifold M, we prove that for every p in (1, 2] and every ε> 0, $ | nabla f |_p^2 le C_ε| Δ^{1{2} + ε} f |_{p}| Δ^{1{2} - ε} f |_{p}.$The estimate is dimension free. This inequality is even proved in the abstract setting of generators of sub-Markov semigroups. 1 authors · Jun 3, 2024
- An Earth Mover's Distance Based Graph Distance Metric For Financial Statements Quantifying the similarity between a group of companies has proven to be useful for several purposes, including company benchmarking, fraud detection, and searching for investment opportunities. This exercise can be done using a variety of data sources, such as company activity data and financial data. However, ledger account data is widely available and is standardized to a large extent. Such ledger accounts within a financial statement can be represented by means of a tree, i.e. a special type of graph, representing both the values of the ledger accounts and the relationships between them. Given their broad availability and rich information content, financial statements form a prime data source based on which company similarities or distances could be computed. In this paper, we present a graph distance metric that enables one to compute the similarity between the financial statements of two companies. We conduct a comprehensive experimental study using real-world financial data to demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed distance metric. The experimental results show promising results on a number of use cases. This method may be useful for investors looking for investment opportunities, government officials attempting to identify fraudulent companies, and accountants looking to benchmark a group of companies based on their financial statements. 4 authors · Dec 14, 2021
- Generative Sliced MMD Flows with Riesz Kernels Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) flows suffer from high computational costs in large scale computations. In this paper, we show that MMD flows with Riesz kernels K(x,y) = - |x-y|^r, r in (0,2) have exceptional properties which allow their efficient computation. We prove that the MMD of Riesz kernels, which is also known as energy distance, coincides with the MMD of their sliced version. As a consequence, the computation of gradients of MMDs can be performed in the one-dimensional setting. Here, for r=1, a simple sorting algorithm can be applied to reduce the complexity from O(MN+N^2) to O((M+N)log(M+N)) for two measures with M and N support points. As another interesting follow-up result, the MMD of compactly supported measures can be estimated from above and below by the Wasserstein-1 distance. For the implementations we approximate the gradient of the sliced MMD by using only a finite number P of slices. We show that the resulting error has complexity O(d/P), where d is the data dimension. These results enable us to train generative models by approximating MMD gradient flows by neural networks even for image applications. We demonstrate the efficiency of our model by image generation on MNIST, FashionMNIST and CIFAR10. 4 authors · May 19, 2023
- A catalogue of complex radio sources in the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey created using a Self-Organising Map Next generations of radio surveys are expected to identify tens of millions of new sources, and identifying and classifying their morphologies will require novel and more efficient methods. Self-Organising Maps (SOMs), a type of unsupervised machine learning, can be used to address this problem. We map 251,259 multi-Gaussian sources from Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) onto a SOM with discrete neurons. Similarity metrics, such as Euclidean distances, can be used to identify the best-matching neuron or unit (BMU) for each input image. We establish a reliability threshold by visually inspecting a subset of input images and their corresponding BMU. We label the individual neurons based on observed morphologies and these labels are included in our value-added catalogue of RACS sources. Sources for which the Euclidean distance to their BMU is lesssim 5 (accounting for approximately 79% of sources) have an estimated >90% reliability for their SOM-derived morphological labels. This reliability falls to less than 70% at Euclidean distances gtrsim 7. Beyond this threshold it is unlikely that the morphological label will accurately describe a given source. Our catalogue of complex radio sources from RACS with their SOM-derived morphological labels from this work will be made publicly available. 3 authors · Dec 13, 2024
1 Stable Vectorization of Multiparameter Persistent Homology using Signed Barcodes as Measures Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case -- where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest -- and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes -- a recent family of MPH descriptors -- as signed measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data. Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique · Jun 6, 2023
- On the extremal length of the hyperbolic metric For any closed hyperbolic Riemann surface X, we show that the extremal length of the Liouville current is determined solely by the topology of \(X\). This confirms a conjecture of Mart\'inez-Granado and Thurston. We also obtain an upper bound, depending only on X, for the diameter of extremal metrics on X with area one. 1 authors · May 18, 2025
- Ordinal Distance Metric Learning with MDS for Image Ranking Image ranking is to rank images based on some known ranked images. In this paper, we propose an improved linear ordinal distance metric learning approach based on the linear distance metric learning model. By decomposing the distance metric A as L^TL, the problem can be cast as looking for a linear map between two sets of points in different spaces, meanwhile maintaining some data structures. The ordinal relation of the labels can be maintained via classical multidimensional scaling, a popular tool for dimension reduction in statistics. A least squares fitting term is then introduced to the cost function, which can also maintain the local data structure. The resulting model is an unconstrained problem, and can better fit the data structure. Extensive numerical results demonstrate the improvement of the new approach over the linear distance metric learning model both in speed and ranking performance. 2 authors · Feb 26, 2019
2 Building and Interpreting Deep Similarity Models Many learning algorithms such as kernel machines, nearest neighbors, clustering, or anomaly detection, are based on the concept of 'distance' or 'similarity'. Before similarities are used for training an actual machine learning model, we would like to verify that they are bound to meaningful patterns in the data. In this paper, we propose to make similarities interpretable by augmenting them with an explanation in terms of input features. We develop BiLRP, a scalable and theoretically founded method to systematically decompose similarity scores on pairs of input features. Our method can be expressed as a composition of LRP explanations, which were shown in previous works to scale to highly nonlinear functions. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that BiLRP robustly explains complex similarity models, e.g. built on VGG-16 deep neural network features. Additionally, we apply our method to an open problem in digital humanities: detailed assessment of similarity between historical documents such as astronomical tables. Here again, BiLRP provides insight and brings verifiability into a highly engineered and problem-specific similarity model. 6 authors · Mar 11, 2020
1 Dataset Distillation via the Wasserstein Metric Dataset Distillation (DD) emerges as a powerful strategy to encapsulate the expansive information of large datasets into significantly smaller, synthetic equivalents, thereby preserving model performance with reduced computational overhead. Pursuing this objective, we introduce the Wasserstein distance, a metric grounded in optimal transport theory, to enhance distribution matching in DD. Our approach employs the Wasserstein barycenter to provide a geometrically meaningful method for quantifying distribution differences and capturing the centroid of distribution sets efficiently. By embedding synthetic data in the feature spaces of pretrained classification models, we facilitate effective distribution matching that leverages prior knowledge inherent in these models. Our method not only maintains the computational advantages of distribution matching-based techniques but also achieves new state-of-the-art performance across a range of high-resolution datasets. Extensive testing demonstrates the effectiveness and adaptability of our method, underscoring the untapped potential of Wasserstein metrics in dataset distillation. 7 authors · Nov 30, 2023
- MALTS: Matching After Learning to Stretch We introduce a flexible framework that produces high-quality almost-exact matches for causal inference. Most prior work in matching uses ad-hoc distance metrics, often leading to poor quality matches, particularly when there are irrelevant covariates. In this work, we learn an interpretable distance metric for matching, which leads to substantially higher quality matches. The learned distance metric stretches the covariate space according to each covariate's contribution to outcome prediction: this stretching means that mismatches on important covariates carry a larger penalty than mismatches on irrelevant covariates. Our ability to learn flexible distance metrics leads to matches that are interpretable and useful for the estimation of conditional average treatment effects. 3 authors · Nov 18, 2018
2 Beyond Euclid: An Illustrated Guide to Modern Machine Learning with Geometric, Topological, and Algebraic Structures The enduring legacy of Euclidean geometry underpins classical machine learning, which, for decades, has been primarily developed for data lying in Euclidean space. Yet, modern machine learning increasingly encounters richly structured data that is inherently nonEuclidean. This data can exhibit intricate geometric, topological and algebraic structure: from the geometry of the curvature of space-time, to topologically complex interactions between neurons in the brain, to the algebraic transformations describing symmetries of physical systems. Extracting knowledge from such non-Euclidean data necessitates a broader mathematical perspective. Echoing the 19th-century revolutions that gave rise to non-Euclidean geometry, an emerging line of research is redefining modern machine learning with non-Euclidean structures. Its goal: generalizing classical methods to unconventional data types with geometry, topology, and algebra. In this review, we provide an accessible gateway to this fast-growing field and propose a graphical taxonomy that integrates recent advances into an intuitive unified framework. We subsequently extract insights into current challenges and highlight exciting opportunities for future development in this field. 9 authors · Jul 12, 2024
- Einstein metrics on aligned homogeneous spaces with two factors Given two homogeneous spaces of the form G_1/K and G_2/K, where G_1 and G_2 are compact simple Lie groups, we study the existence problem for G_1xG_2-invariant Einstein metrics on the homogeneous space M=G_1xG_2/K. For the large subclass C of spaces having three pairwise inequivalent isotropy irreducible summands (12 infinite families and 70 sporadic examples), we obtain that existence is equivalent to the existence of a real root for certain quartic polynomial depending on the dimensions and two Killing constants, which allows a full classification and the possibility to weigh the existence and non-existence pieces of C. 2 authors · Aug 1, 2024
- On Mitigating the Utility-Loss in Differentially Private Learning: A new Perspective by a Geometrically Inspired Kernel Approach Privacy-utility tradeoff remains as one of the fundamental issues of differentially private machine learning. This paper introduces a geometrically inspired kernel-based approach to mitigate the accuracy-loss issue in classification. In this approach, a representation of the affine hull of given data points is learned in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). This leads to a novel distance measure that hides privacy-sensitive information about individual data points and improves the privacy-utility tradeoff via significantly reducing the risk of membership inference attacks. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through experiments on MNIST dataset, Freiburg groceries dataset, and a real biomedical dataset. It is verified that the approach remains computationally practical. The application of the approach to federated learning is considered and it is observed that the accuracy-loss due to data being distributed is either marginal or not significantly high. 3 authors · Apr 3, 2023
- Multi-Fidelity Covariance Estimation in the Log-Euclidean Geometry We introduce a multi-fidelity estimator of covariance matrices that employs the log-Euclidean geometry of the symmetric positive-definite manifold. The estimator fuses samples from a hierarchy of data sources of differing fidelities and costs for variance reduction while guaranteeing definiteness, in contrast with previous approaches. The new estimator makes covariance estimation tractable in applications where simulation or data collection is expensive; to that end, we develop an optimal sample allocation scheme that minimizes the mean-squared error of the estimator given a fixed budget. Guaranteed definiteness is crucial to metric learning, data assimilation, and other downstream tasks. Evaluations of our approach using data from physical applications (heat conduction, fluid dynamics) demonstrate more accurate metric learning and speedups of more than one order of magnitude compared to benchmarks. 4 authors · Jan 31, 2023
1 Manify: A Python Library for Learning Non-Euclidean Representations We present Manify, an open-source Python library for non-Euclidean representation learning. Leveraging manifold learning techniques, Manify provides tools for learning embeddings in (products of) non-Euclidean spaces, performing classification and regression with data that lives in such spaces, and estimating the curvature of a manifold. Manify aims to advance research and applications in machine learning by offering a comprehensive suite of tools for manifold-based data analysis. Our source code, examples, datasets, results, and documentation are available at https://github.com/pchlenski/manify 4 authors · Mar 12, 2025 1
- Practical and Optimal LSH for Angular Distance We show the existence of a Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) family for the angular distance that yields an approximate Near Neighbor Search algorithm with the asymptotically optimal running time exponent. Unlike earlier algorithms with this property (e.g., Spherical LSH [Andoni, Indyk, Nguyen, Razenshteyn 2014], [Andoni, Razenshteyn 2015]), our algorithm is also practical, improving upon the well-studied hyperplane LSH [Charikar, 2002] in practice. We also introduce a multiprobe version of this algorithm, and conduct experimental evaluation on real and synthetic data sets. We complement the above positive results with a fine-grained lower bound for the quality of any LSH family for angular distance. Our lower bound implies that the above LSH family exhibits a trade-off between evaluation time and quality that is close to optimal for a natural class of LSH functions. 5 authors · Sep 9, 2015
- Quantum Geometric Tensor for Mixed States Based on the Covariant Derivative The quantum geometric tensor (QGT) is a fundamental quantity for characterizing the geometric properties of quantum states and plays an essential role in elucidating various physical phenomena. The traditional QGT, defined only for pure states, has limited applicability in realistic scenarios where mixed states are common. To address this limitation, we generalize the definition of the QGT to mixed states using the purification bundle and the covariant derivative. Notably, our proposed definition reduces to the traditional QGT when mixed states approach pure states. In our framework, the real and imaginary parts of this generalized QGT correspond to the Bures metric and the mean gauge curvature, respectively, endowing it with a broad range of potential applications. Additionally, using our proposed mixed-state QGT (MSQGT), we derive the geodesic equation applicable to mixed states. This work establishes a unified framework for the geometric analysis of both pure and mixed states, thereby deepening our understanding of the geometric properties of quantum states. 4 authors · May 30, 2025
- Dissecting graph measure performance for node clustering in LFR parameter space Graph measures that express closeness or distance between nodes can be employed for graph nodes clustering using metric clustering algorithms. There are numerous measures applicable to this task, and which one performs better is an open question. We study the performance of 25 graph measures on generated graphs with different parameters. While usually measure comparisons are limited to general measure ranking on a particular dataset, we aim to explore the performance of various measures depending on graph features. Using an LFR graph generator, we create a dataset of 11780 graphs covering the whole LFR parameter space. For each graph, we assess the quality of clustering with k-means algorithm for each considered measure. Based on this, we determine the best measure for each area of the parameter space. We find that the parameter space consists of distinct zones where one particular measure is the best. We analyze the geometry of the resulting zones and describe it with simple criteria. Given particular graph parameters, this allows us to recommend a particular measure to use for clustering. 2 authors · Feb 20, 2022
3 T-REGS: Minimum Spanning Tree Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning representations without labeled data, often by enforcing invariance to input transformations such as rotations or blurring. Recent studies have highlighted two pivotal properties for effective representations: (i) avoiding dimensional collapse-where the learned features occupy only a low-dimensional subspace, and (ii) enhancing uniformity of the induced distribution. In this work, we introduce T-REGS, a simple regularization framework for SSL based on the length of the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) over the learned representation. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that T-REGS simultaneously mitigates dimensional collapse and promotes distribution uniformity on arbitrary compact Riemannian manifolds. Several experiments on synthetic data and on classical SSL benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach at enhancing representation quality. Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique · Oct 27, 2025
1 Interpolation for Robust Learning: Data Augmentation on Geodesics We propose to study and promote the robustness of a model as per its performance through the interpolation of training data distributions. Specifically, (1) we augment the data by finding the worst-case Wasserstein barycenter on the geodesic connecting subpopulation distributions of different categories. (2) We regularize the model for smoother performance on the continuous geodesic path connecting subpopulation distributions. (3) Additionally, we provide a theoretical guarantee of robustness improvement and investigate how the geodesic location and the sample size contribute, respectively. Experimental validations of the proposed strategy on four datasets, including CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, establish the efficacy of our method, e.g., our method improves the baselines' certifiable robustness on CIFAR10 up to 7.7%, with 16.8% on empirical robustness on CIFAR-100. Our work provides a new perspective of model robustness through the lens of Wasserstein geodesic-based interpolation with a practical off-the-shelf strategy that can be combined with existing robust training methods. 7 authors · Feb 3, 2023
- Learning Nonlinear State Space Models with Hamiltonian Sequential Monte Carlo Sampler State space models (SSM) have been widely applied for the analysis and visualization of large sequential datasets. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a very popular particle-based method to sample latent states from intractable posteriors. However, SSM is significantly influenced by the choice of the proposal. Recently Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling has shown success in many practical problems. In this paper, we propose an SMC augmented by HMC (HSMC) for inference and model learning of nonlinear SSM, which can exempt us from learning proposals and reduce the model complexity significantly. Based on the measure preserving property of HMC, the particles directly generated by transition function can approximate the posterior of latent states arbitrarily well. In order to better adapt to the local geometry of latent space, the HMC is conducted on Riemannian manifold defined by a positive definite metric. In addition, we show that the proposed HSMC method can improve SSMs realized by both Gaussian Processes (GP) and Neural Network (NN). 1 authors · Jan 3, 2019
- Improving Convergence and Generalization Using Parameter Symmetries In many neural networks, different values of the parameters may result in the same loss value. Parameter space symmetries are loss-invariant transformations that change the model parameters. Teleportation applies such transformations to accelerate optimization. However, the exact mechanism behind this algorithm's success is not well understood. In this paper, we show that teleportation not only speeds up optimization in the short-term, but gives overall faster time to convergence. Additionally, teleporting to minima with different curvatures improves generalization, which suggests a connection between the curvature of the minimum and generalization ability. Finally, we show that integrating teleportation into a wide range of optimization algorithms and optimization-based meta-learning improves convergence. Our results showcase the versatility of teleportation and demonstrate the potential of incorporating symmetry in optimization. 4 authors · May 22, 2023
- FlowMM: Generating Materials with Riemannian Flow Matching Crystalline materials are a fundamental component in next-generation technologies, yet modeling their distribution presents unique computational challenges. Of the plausible arrangements of atoms in a periodic lattice only a vanishingly small percentage are thermodynamically stable, which is a key indicator of the materials that can be experimentally realized. Two fundamental tasks in this area are to (a) predict the stable crystal structure of a known composition of elements and (b) propose novel compositions along with their stable structures. We present FlowMM, a pair of generative models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on both tasks while being more efficient and more flexible than competing methods. We generalize Riemannian Flow Matching to suit the symmetries inherent to crystals: translation, rotation, permutation, and periodic boundary conditions. Our framework enables the freedom to choose the flow base distributions, drastically simplifying the problem of learning crystal structures compared with diffusion models. In addition to standard benchmarks, we validate FlowMM's generated structures with quantum chemistry calculations, demonstrating that it is about 3x more efficient, in terms of integration steps, at finding stable materials compared to previous open methods. 4 authors · Jun 7, 2024
1 Exploring Geometric Representational Alignment through Ollivier-Ricci Curvature and Ricci Flow Representational analysis explores how input data of a neural system are encoded in high dimensional spaces of its distributed neural activations, and how we can compare different systems, for instance, artificial neural networks and brains, on those grounds. While existing methods offer important insights, they typically do not account for local intrinsic geometrical properties within the high-dimensional representation spaces. To go beyond these limitations, we explore Ollivier-Ricci curvature and Ricci flow as tools to study the alignment of representations between humans and artificial neural systems on a geometric level. As a proof-of-principle study, we compared the representations of face stimuli between VGG-Face, a human-aligned version of VGG-Face, and corresponding human similarity judgments from a large online study. Using this discrete geometric framework, we were able to identify local structural similarities and differences by examining the distributions of node and edge curvature and higher-level properties by detecting and comparing community structure in the representational graphs. 4 authors · Jan 1, 2025
2 Geodesic Prototype Matching via Diffusion Maps for Interpretable Fine-Grained Recognition Nonlinear manifolds are widespread in deep visual features, where Euclidean distances often fail to capture true similarity. This limitation becomes particularly severe in prototype-based interpretable fine-grained recognition, where subtle semantic distinctions are essential. To address this challenge, we propose a novel paradigm for prototype-based recognition that anchors similarity within the intrinsic geometry of deep features. Specifically, we distill the latent manifold structure of each class into a diffusion space and introduce a differentiable Nystr\"om interpolation, making the geometry accessible to both unseen samples and learnable prototypes. To ensure efficiency, we employ compact per-class landmark sets with periodic updates. This design keeps the embedding aligned with the evolving backbone, enabling fast and scalable inference. Extensive experiments on the CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars datasets show that our GeoProto framework produces prototypes focusing on semantically aligned parts, significantly outperforming Euclidean prototype networks. 7 authors · Sep 21, 2025
- SPARE: Symmetrized Point-to-Plane Distance for Robust Non-Rigid Registration Existing optimization-based methods for non-rigid registration typically minimize an alignment error metric based on the point-to-point or point-to-plane distance between corresponding point pairs on the source surface and target surface. However, these metrics can result in slow convergence or a loss of detail. In this paper, we propose SPARE, a novel formulation that utilizes a symmetrized point-to-plane distance for robust non-rigid registration. The symmetrized point-to-plane distance relies on both the positions and normals of the corresponding points, resulting in a more accurate approximation of the underlying geometry and can achieve higher accuracy than existing methods. To solve this optimization problem efficiently, we introduce an as-rigid-as-possible regulation term to estimate the deformed normals and propose an alternating minimization solver using a majorization-minimization strategy. Moreover, for effective initialization of the solver, we incorporate a deformation graph-based coarse alignment that improves registration quality and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method greatly improves the accuracy of non-rigid registration problems and maintains relatively high solution efficiency. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yaoyx689/spare. 4 authors · May 30, 2024
- Hyperbolic Category Discovery Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention. Given a dataset that includes both labelled and unlabelled images, GCD aims to categorize all images in the unlabelled subset, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. In GCD, the common practice typically involves applying a spherical projection operator at the end of the self-supervised pretrained backbone, operating within Euclidean or spherical space. However, both of these spaces have been shown to be suboptimal for encoding samples that possesses hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic space exhibits exponential volume growth relative to radius, making it inherently strong at capturing the hierarchical structure of samples from both seen and unseen categories. Therefore, we propose to tackle the category discovery challenge in the hyperbolic space. We introduce HypCD, a simple Hyperbolic framework for learning hierarchy-aware representations and classifiers for generalized Category Discovery. HypCD first transforms the Euclidean embedding space of the backbone network into hyperbolic space, facilitating subsequent representation and classification learning by considering both hyperbolic distance and the angle between samples. This approach is particularly helpful for knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories in GCD. We thoroughly evaluate HypCD on public GCD benchmarks, by applying it to various baseline and state-of-the-art methods, consistently achieving significant improvements. 3 authors · Apr 8, 2025
- 6D Rotation Representation For Unconstrained Head Pose Estimation In this paper, we present a method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation. We address the problem of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This way, our method can learn the full rotation appearance which is contrary to previous approaches that restrict the pose prediction to a narrow-angle for satisfactory results. In addition, we propose a geodesic distance-based loss to penalize our network with respect to the SO(3) manifold geometry. Experiments on the public AFLW2000 and BIWI datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by up to 20\%. We open-source our training and testing code along with our pre-trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet. 3 authors · Feb 25, 2022
- Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art. 7 authors · Jun 10, 2021
- Concavity Properties of Solutions of Elliptic Equations under Conformal Deformations We study the Dirichlet problem for the weighted Schr\"odinger operator \[-\Delta u +Vu = \lambda \rho u,\] where rho is a positive weighting function and V is a potential. Such equations appear naturally in conformal geometry and in the composite membrane problem. Our primary goal is to establish concavity estimates for the principle eigenfunction with respect to conformal connections. Doing so, we obtain new bounds on the fundamental gap problem, which is the difference between the first and second eigenvalues. In particular, we partially resolve a conjecture of Nguyen, Stancu and Wei [IMRN 2022] on the fundamental gap of horoconvex domains. In addition, we obtain a power convexity estimate for solutions to the torsion problem in spherical geometry on convex domains which are not too large. 3 authors · Mar 5, 2024
6 Geometric Stability: The Missing Axis of Representations Analysis of learned representations has a blind spot: it focuses on similarity, measuring how closely embeddings align with external references, but similarity reveals only what is represented, not whether that structure is robust. We introduce geometric stability, a distinct dimension that quantifies how reliably representational geometry holds under perturbation, and present Shesha, a framework for measuring it. Across 2,463 configurations in seven domains, we show that stability and similarity are empirically uncorrelated (ρapprox 0.01) and mechanistically distinct: similarity metrics collapse after removing the top principal components, while stability retains sensitivity to fine-grained manifold structure. This distinction yields actionable insights: for safety monitoring, stability acts as a functional geometric canary, detecting structural drift nearly 2times more sensitively than CKA while filtering out the non-functional noise that triggers false alarms in rigid distance metrics; for controllability, supervised stability predicts linear steerability (ρ= 0.89-0.96); for model selection, stability dissociates from transferability, revealing a geometric tax that transfer optimization incurs. Beyond machine learning, stability predicts CRISPR perturbation coherence and neural-behavioral coupling. By quantifying how reliably systems maintain structure, geometric stability provides a necessary complement to similarity for auditing representations across biological and computational systems. 1 authors · Jan 14 2
1 PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds for Adversarial Generative Models We extend PAC-Bayesian theory to generative models and develop generalization bounds for models based on the Wasserstein distance and the total variation distance. Our first result on the Wasserstein distance assumes the instance space is bounded, while our second result takes advantage of dimensionality reduction. Our results naturally apply to Wasserstein GANs and Energy-Based GANs, and our bounds provide new training objectives for these two. Although our work is mainly theoretical, we perform numerical experiments showing non-vacuous generalization bounds for Wasserstein GANs on synthetic datasets. 3 authors · Feb 17, 2023