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Soft Geometric Inductive Bias for Object Centric Dynamics

Machine Learning 2025-12-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:29:18.783Z