Equivariance is a powerful prior for learning physical dynamics, yet exact group equivariance can degrade performance if the symmetries are broken. We propose object-centric world models built with geometric algebra neural networks, providing a soft geometric inductive bias. Our models are evaluated using simulated environments of 2d rigid body dynamics with static obstacles, where we train for next-step predictions autoregressively. For long-horizon rollouts we show that the soft inductive bias of our models results in better performance in terms of physical fidelity compared to non-equivariant baseline models. The approach complements recent soft-equivariance ideas and aligns with the view that simple, well-chosen priors can yield robust generalization. These results suggest that geometric algebra offers an effective middle ground between hand-crafted physics and unstructured deep nets, delivering sample-efficient dynamics models for multi-object scenes.
@article{arxiv.2512.15493,
title = {Soft Geometric Inductive Bias for Object Centric Dynamics},
author = {Hampus Linander and Conor Heins and Alexander Tschantz and Marco Perin and Christopher Buckley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.15493},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
8 pages, 11 figures; 6 pages supplementary material