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SPD Learn: A Geometric Deep Learning Python Library for Neural Decoding Through Trivialization

Neurons and Cognition 2026-02-27 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Implementations of symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix-based neural networks for neural decoding remain fragmented across research codebases and Python packages. Existing implementations often employ ad hoc handling of manifold constraints and non-unified training setups, which hinders reproducibility and integration into modern deep-learning workflows. To address this gap, we introduce SPD Learn, a unified and modular Python package for geometric deep learning with SPD matrices. SPD Learn provides core SPD operators and neural-network layers, including numerically stable spectral operators, and enforces Stiefel/SPD constraints via trivialization-based parameterizations. This design enables standard backpropagation and optimization in unconstrained Euclidean spaces while producing manifold-constrained parameters by construction. The package also offers reference implementations of representative SPDNet-based models and interfaces with widely used brain computer interface/neuroimaging toolkits and modern machine-learning libraries (e.g., MOABB, Braindecode, Nilearn, and SKADA), facilitating reproducible benchmarking and practical deployment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22895,
  title  = {SPD Learn: A Geometric Deep Learning Python Library for Neural Decoding Through Trivialization},
  author = {Bruno Aristimunha and Ce Ju and Antoine Collas and Florent Bouchard and Ammar Mian and Bertrand Thirion and Sylvain Chevallier and Reinmar Kobler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22895},
  year   = {2026}
}

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9 Pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:53:44.808Z