We introduce Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs), a natural generalization of convolutional neural networks that reduces sample complexity by exploiting symmetries. G-CNNs use G-convolutions, a new type of layer that enjoys a substantially higher degree of weight sharing than regular convolution layers. G-convolutions increase the expressive capacity of the network without increasing the number of parameters. Group convolution layers are easy to use and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead for discrete groups generated by translations, reflections and rotations. G-CNNs achieve state of the art results on CIFAR10 and rotated MNIST.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校数学与统计系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Mathematics, Duke University（杜克大学数学系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University（杜克大学电气与计算机工程系）
Encoding the scale information explicitly into the representation learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN) is beneficial for many computer vision tasks especially when dealing with multiscale inputs. We study, in this paper, a scaling-translation-equivariant (ST-equivariant) CNN with joint convolutions across the space and the scaling group, which is shown to be both sufficient and necessary to achieve equivariance for the regular representation of the scaling-translation group ST . To reduce the model complexity and computational burden, we decompose the convolutional filters under two…
University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）；Research Institute for Computational Science Co. Ltd.（计算科学研究所有限公司）
Graphs are one of the most important data structures for representing pairwise relations between objects. Specifically, a graph embedded in a Euclidean space is essential to solving real problems, such as physical simulations. A crucial requirement for applying graphs in Euclidean spaces to physical simulations is learning and inferring the isometric transformation invariant and equivariant features in a computationally efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a set of transformation invariant and equivariant models based on graph convolutional networks, called IsoGCNs. We demonstrate that …
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）
Lattice gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks (L-CNNs) are a framework for convolutional neural networks that can be applied to non-Abelian lattice gauge theories without violating gauge symmetry. We demonstrate how L-CNNs can be equipped with global group equivariance. This allows us to extend the formulation to be equivariant not just under translations but under global lattice symmetries such as rotations and reflections. Additionally, we provide a geometric formulation of L-CNNs and show how convolutions in L-CNNs arise as a special case of gauge equivariant neural networks on SU…
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Although group convolutional networks are able to learn powerful representations based on symmetry patterns, they lack explicit means to learn meaningful relationships among them (e.g., relative positions and poses). In this paper, we present attentive group equivariant convolutions, a generalization of the group convolution, in which attention is applied during the course of convolution to accentuate meaningful symmetry combinations and suppress non-plausible, misleading ones. We indicate that prior work on visual attention can be described as special cases of our proposed framework and show …
$G$-equivariant convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) is a geometric deep learning model for data defined on a homogeneous $G$-space $\mathcal{M}$. GCNNs are designed to respect the global symmetry in $\mathcal{M}$, thereby facilitating learning. In this paper, we analyze GCNNs on homogeneous spaces $\mathcal{M} = G/K$ in the case of unimodular Lie groups $G$ and compact subgroups $K \leq G$. We demonstrate that homogeneous vector bundles is the natural setting for GCNNs. We also use reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces to obtain a precise criterion for expressing $G$-equivariant layers as convol…
We propose a semantic segmentation model that exploits rotation and reflection symmetries. We demonstrate significant gains in sample efficiency due to increased weight sharing, as well as improvements in robustness to symmetry transformations. The group equivariant CNN framework is extended for segmentation by introducing a new equivariant (G->Z2)-convolution that transforms feature maps on a group to planar feature maps. Also, equivariant transposed convolution is formulated for up-sampling in an encoder-decoder network. To demonstrate improvements in sample efficiency we evaluate on multipl…
Explicit encoding of group actions in deep features makes it possible for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to handle global deformations of images, which is critical to success in many vision tasks. This paper proposes to decompose the convolutional filters over joint steerable bases across the space and the group geometry simultaneously, namely a rotation-equivariant CNN with decomposed convolutional filters (RotDCF). This decomposition facilitates computing the joint convolution, which is proved to be necessary for the group equivariance. It significantly reduces the model size and compu…
We prove an impossibility result, which in the context of function learning says the following: under certain conditions, it is impossible to simultaneously learn symmetries and functions equivariant under them using an ansatz consisting of equivariant functions. To formalize this statement, we carefully study notions of approximation for groups and semigroups. We analyze certain families of neural networks for whether they satisfy the conditions of the impossibility result: what we call ``linearly equivariant'' networks, and group-convolutional networks. A lot can be said precisely about line…
We propose Lattice gauge equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (L-CNNs) for generic machine learning applications on lattice gauge theoretical problems. At the heart of this network structure is a novel convolutional layer that preserves gauge equivariance while forming arbitrarily shaped Wilson loops in successive bilinear layers. Together with topological information, for example from Polyakov loops, such a network can in principle approximate any gauge covariant function on the lattice. We demonstrate that L-CNNs can learn and generalize gauge invariant quantities that traditional convo…
Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
The principle of equivariance to symmetry transformations enables a theoretically grounded approach to neural network architecture design. Equivariant networks have shown excellent performance and data efficiency on vision and medical imaging problems that exhibit symmetries. Here we show how this principle can be extended beyond global symmetries to local gauge transformations. This enables the development of a very general class of convolutional neural networks on manifolds that depend only on the intrinsic geometry, and which includes many popular methods from equivariant and geometric deep…
Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学斯科贝尔琴核物理研究所）
Currently there exists rather promising new trend in machine leaning (ML) based on the relationship between neural networks (NN) and Gaussian processes (GP), including many related subtopics, e.g., signal propagation in NNs, theoretical derivation of learning curve for NNs, QFT methods in ML, etc. An important feature of convolutional neural networks (CNN) is their equivariance (consistency) with respect to the symmetry transformations of the input data. In this work we establish a relationship between the many-channel limit for CNNs equivariant with respect to two-dimensional Euclidean group …
Center for Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, BCM（贝勒医学院神经科学与人工智能中心）；Baylor College of Medicine（贝勒医学院）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of Tübingen（图宾根大学伯恩斯坦计算神经科学中心）；Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics（马克斯·普朗克生物控制论研究所）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Classical models describe primary visual cortex (V1) as a filter bank of orientation-selective linear-nonlinear (LN) or energy models, but these models fail to predict neural responses to natural stimuli accurately. Recent work shows that models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) lead to much more accurate predictions, but it remains unclear which features are extracted by V1 neurons beyond orientation selectivity and phase invariance. Here we work towards systematically studying V1 computations by categorizing neurons into groups that perform similar computations. We present a fram…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
We propose learnable polyphase sampling (LPS), a pair of learnable down/upsampling layers that enable truly shift-invariant and equivariant convolutional networks. LPS can be trained end-to-end from data and generalizes existing handcrafted downsampling layers. It is widely applicable as it can be integrated into any convolutional network by replacing down/upsampling layers. We evaluate LPS on image classification and semantic segmentation. Experiments show that LPS is on-par with or outperforms existing methods in both performance and shift consistency. For the first time, we achieve true shi…
Subsampling is used in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the form of pooling or strided convolutions, to reduce the spatial dimensions of feature maps and to allow the receptive fields to grow exponentially with depth. However, it is known that such subsampling operations are not translation equivariant, unlike convolutions that are translation equivariant. Here, we first introduce translation equivariant subsampling/upsampling layers that can be used to construct exact translation equivariant CNNs. We then generalise these layers beyond translations to general groups, thus proposing gro…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能研究中心）
Group symmetry is inherent in a wide variety of data distributions. Data processing that preserves symmetry is described as an equivariant map and often effective in achieving high performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been known as models with equivariance and shown to approximate equivariant maps for some specific groups. However, universal approximation theorems for CNNs have been separately derived with individual techniques according to each group and setting. This paper provides a unified method to obtain universal approximation theorems for equivariant maps by CNNs in v…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）
Motivated by the vast success of deep convolutional networks, there is a great interest in generalizing convolutions to non-Euclidean manifolds. A major complication in comparison to flat spaces is that it is unclear in which alignment a convolution kernel should be applied on a manifold. The underlying reason for this ambiguity is that general manifolds do not come with a canonical choice of reference frames (gauge). Kernels and features therefore have to be expressed relative to arbitrary coordinates. We argue that the particular choice of coordinatization should not affect a network's infer…
NTNU（挪威科技大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
In recent years the use of convolutional layers to encode an inductive bias (translational equivariance) in neural networks has proven to be a very fruitful idea. The successes of this approach have motivated a line of research into incorporating other symmetries into deep learning methods, in the form of group equivariant convolutional neural networks. Much of this work has been focused on roto-translational symmetry of $\mathbf R^d$, but other examples are the scaling symmetry of $\mathbf R^d$ and rotational symmetry of the sphere. In this work, we demonstrate that group equivariant convolut…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；CIFAR（加拿大高等研究院）；Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
We present a convolutional network that is equivariant to rigid body motions. The model uses scalar-, vector-, and tensor fields over 3D Euclidean space to represent data, and equivariant convolutions to map between such representations. These SE(3)-equivariant convolutions utilize kernels which are parameterized as a linear combination of a complete steerable kernel basis, which is derived analytically in this paper. We prove that equivariant convolutions are the most general equivariant linear maps between fields over R^3. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of 3D Steerable CN…
Group equivariant neural networks are used as building blocks of group invariant neural networks, which have been shown to improve generalisation performance and data efficiency through principled parameter sharing. Such works have mostly focused on group equivariant convolutions, building on the result that group equivariant linear maps are necessarily convolutions. In this work, we extend the scope of the literature to self-attention, that is emerging as a prominent building block of deep learning models. We propose the LieTransformer, an architecture composed of LieSelfAttention layers that…
UvA-Bosch Delta Lab（阿姆斯特丹大学-博世德尔塔实验室）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been substantially attributed to their built-in property of translation equivariance. However, CNNs do not have embedded mechanisms to handle other types of transformations. In this work, we pay attention to scale changes, which regularly appear in various tasks due to the changing distances between the objects and the camera. First, we introduce the general theory for building scale-equivariant convolutional networks with steerable filters. We develop scale-convolution and generalize other common blocks to be scale-equivariant. We …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
The role of data embedding in equivariant quantum convolutional neural networks
Istituto Nazionale di Ottica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-INO)（国家光学研究所（国家研究委员会光学研究所））；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS)（欧洲非线性光谱实验室）
Machine learning a fixed point action for SU(3) gauge theory with a gauge equivariant convolutional neural network
University of the Pacific（太平洋大学）；Institute for Theoretical Physics, TU Wien（维也纳技术大学理论物理研究所）；Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Bern（伯尔尼大学理论物理研究所）
We explain equivariant neural networks, a notion underlying breakthroughs in machine learning from deep convolutional neural networks for computer vision to AlphaFold 2 for protein structure prediction, without assuming knowledge of equivariance or neural networks. The basic mathematical ideas are simple but are often obscured by engineering complications that come with practical realizations. We extract and focus on the mathematical aspects, and limit ourselves to a cursory treatment of the engineering issues at the end.
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Halicioglu Data Science Institute, University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校哈利西奥格鲁数据科学研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
We present a SE(3)-equivariant graph neural network (GNN) approach that directly predicting the formation factor and effective permeability from micro-CT images. FFT solvers are established to compute both the formation factor and effective permeability, while the topology and geometry of the pore space are represented by a persistence-based Morse graph. Together, they constitute the database for training, validating, and testing the neural networks. While the graph and Euclidean convolutional approaches both employ neural networks to generate low-dimensional latent space to represent the feat…
Istituto Nazionale di Ottica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-INO)（意大利国家光学研究所（国家研究委员会光学研究所））；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS)（欧洲非线性光谱实验室）
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Existing equivariant neural networks require prior knowledge of the symmetry group and discretization for continuous groups. We propose to work with Lie algebras (infinitesimal generators) instead of Lie groups. Our model, the Lie algebra convolutional network (L-conv) can automatically discover symmetries and does not require discretization of the group. We show that L-conv can serve as a building block to construct any group equivariant feedforward architecture. Both CNNs and Graph Convolutional Networks can be expressed as L-conv with appropriate groups. We discover direct connections betwe…
School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia（东安格利亚大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Physics and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway（北极大学挪威分校物理与技术系）
We review a novel neural network architecture called lattice gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks (L-CNNs), which can be applied to generic machine learning problems in lattice gauge theory while exactly preserving gauge symmetry. We discuss the concept of gauge equivariance which we use to explicitly construct a gauge equivariant convolutional layer and a bilinear layer. The performance of L-CNNs and non-equivariant CNNs is compared using seemingly simple non-linear regression tasks, where L-CNNs demonstrate generalizability and achieve a high degree of accuracy in their prediction…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Gothenburg University（哥德堡大学）；Umeå University（于默奥大学）；Zenseact
We survey the mathematical foundations of geometric deep learning, focusing on group equivariant and gauge equivariant neural networks. We develop gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks on arbitrary manifolds $\mathcal{M}$ using principal bundles with structure group $K$ and equivariant maps between sections of associated vector bundles. We also discuss group equivariant neural networks for homogeneous spaces $\mathcal{M}=G/K$, which are instead equivariant with respect to the global symmetry $G$ on $\mathcal{M}$. Group equivariant layers can be interpreted as intertwiners between ind…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
We present a PDE-based framework that generalizes Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs). In this framework, a network layer is seen as a set of PDE-solvers where geometrically meaningful PDE-coefficients become the layer's trainable weights. Formulating our PDEs on homogeneous spaces allows these networks to be designed with built-in symmetries such as rotation in addition to the standard translation equivariance of CNNs. Having all the desired symmetries included in the design obviates the need to include them by means of costly techniques such as data augmentation. We will…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉 - 魁北克人工智能研究所）
Group invariant and equivariant Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), also known as Equivariant Networks, have achieved remarkable success in learning on a variety of data structures, such as sequences, images, sets, and graphs. Using tools from group theory, this paper proves the universality of a broad class of equivariant MLPs with a single hidden layer. In particular, it is shown that having a hidden layer on which the group acts regularly is sufficient for universal equivariance (invariance). A corollary is unconditional universality of equivariant MLPs for Abelian groups, such as CNNs with a sin…
FaceBook（脸书）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Convolutional neural networks have been highly successful in image-based learning tasks due to their translation equivariance property. Recent work has generalized the traditional convolutional layer of a convolutional neural network to non-Euclidean spaces and shown group equivariance of the generalized convolution operation. In this paper, we present a novel higher order Volterra convolutional neural network (VolterraNet) for data defined as samples of functions on Riemannian homogeneous spaces. Analagous to the result for traditional convolutions, we prove that the Volterra functional convo…
Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）
We demonstrate an object tracking method for 3D images with fixed computational cost and state-of-the-art performance. Previous methods predicted transformation parameters from convolutional layers. We instead propose an architecture that does not include either flattening of convolutional features or fully connected layers, but instead relies on equivariant filters to preserve transformations between inputs and outputs (e.g. rot./trans. of inputs rotate/translate outputs). The transformation is then derived in closed form from the outputs of the filters. This method is useful for applications…
Group equivariant convolutional networks (GCNNs) endow classical convolutional networks with additional symmetry priors, which can lead to a considerably improved performance. Recent advances in the theoretical description of GCNNs revealed that such models can generally be understood as performing convolutions with G-steerable kernels, that is, kernels that satisfy an equivariance constraint themselves. While the G-steerability constraint has been derived, it has to date only been solved for specific use cases - a general characterization of G-steerable kernel spaces is still missing. This wo…
