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In many real-world applications of regression, conditional probability estimation, and uncertainty quantification, exploiting symmetries rooted in physics or geometry can dramatically improve generalization and sample efficiency. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Daniel Ordoñez-Apraez , Vladimir Kostić , Alek Fröhlich , Vivien Brandt , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil

We study the problem of learning equivariant neural networks via gradient descent. The incorporation of known symmetries ("equivariance") into neural nets has empirically improved the performance of learning pipelines, in domains ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Bobak T. Kiani , Thien Le , Hannah Lawrence , Stefanie Jegelka , Melanie Weber

It is often said that a deep learning model is "invariant" to some specific type of transformation. However, what is meant by this statement strongly depends on the context in which it is made. In this paper we explore the nature of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Henry Kvinge , Tegan H. Emerson , Grayson Jorgenson , Scott Vasquez , Timothy Doster , Jesse D. Lew

Equivariance w.r.t. geometric transformations in neural networks improves data efficiency, parameter efficiency and robustness to out-of-domain perspective shifts. When equivariance is not designed into a neural network, the network can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Robert-Jan Bruintjes , Tomasz Motyka , Jan van Gemert

Units equivariance (or units covariance) is the exact symmetry that follows from the requirement that relationships among measured quantities of physics relevance must obey self-consistent dimensional scalings. Here, we express this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Soledad Villar , Weichi Yao , David W. Hogg , Ben Blum-Smith , Bianca Dumitrascu

Universality results for equivariant neural networks remain rare. Those that do exist typically hold only in restrictive settings: either they rely on regular or higher-order tensor representations, leading to impractically high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-20 Marco Pacini , Mircea Petrache , Bruno Lepri , Shubhendu Trivedi , Robin Walters

Equivariant neural networks encode the intrinsic symmetry of data as an inductive bias, which has achieved impressive performance in wide domains. However, the understanding to their expressive power remains premature. Focusing on 2-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yuzhu Chen , Tian Qin , Xinmei Tian , Fengxiang He , Dacheng Tao

The rising adoption of machine learning in high energy physics and lattice field theory necessitates the re-evaluation of common methods that are widely used in computer vision, which, when applied to problems in physics, can lead to…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2021-10-12 Srinath Bulusu , Matteo Favoni , Andreas Ipp , David I. Müller , Daniel Schuh

The set of functions parameterized by a linear fully-connected neural network is a determinantal variety. We investigate the subvariety of functions that are equivariant or invariant under the action of a permutation group. Examples of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Kathlén Kohn , Anna-Laura Sattelberger , Vahid Shahverdi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-19 Vasco Portilheiro

Neural networks work remarkably well in practice and theoretically they can be universal approximators. However, they still make mistakes and a specific type of them called adversarial errors seem inexcusable to humans. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Pieter-Jan Kindermans , Charles Staats

Steerable convolutional neural networks (SCNNs) enhance task performance by modelling geometric symmetries through equivariance constraints on weights. Yet, unknown or varying symmetries can lead to overconstrained weights and decreased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Lars Veefkind , Gabriele Cesa

Equivariant networks have been adopted in many 3-D learning areas. Here we identify a fundamental limitation of these networks: their ambiguity to symmetries. Equivariant networks cannot complete symmetry-dependent tasks like segmenting a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Sidhika Balachandar , Adrien Poulenard , Congyue Deng , Leonidas Guibas

Invariance under symmetry is an important problem in machine learning. Our paper looks specifically at equivariant neural networks where transformations of inputs yield homomorphic transformations of outputs. Here, steerable CNNs have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Daniel Franzen , Michael Wand

Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Marco Pacini , Xiaowen Dong , Bruno Lepri , Gabriele Santin

Equivariant neural networks are a class of neural networks designed to preserve symmetries inherent in the data. In this paper, we introduce a general method for modifying a neural network to enforce equivariance, a process we refer to as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Erkao Bao , Jingcheng Lu , Linqi Song , Nathan Hart-Hodgson , William Parson , Yanheng Zhou

Group Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs) constrain learned features to respect the symmetries in the selected group, and lead to better generalization when these symmetries appear in the data. If this is not the case, however,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-01-18 David W. Romero , Suhas Lohit

Equivariant deep learning architectures exploit symmetries in learning problems to improve the sample efficiency of neural-network-based models and their ability to generalise. However, when modelling real-world data, learning problems are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-12 Matthew Ashman , Cristiana Diaconu , Adrian Weller , Wessel Bruinsma , Richard E. Turner

Recent work has shown the utility of developing machine learning models that respect the structure and symmetries of eigenvectors. These works promote sign invariance, since for any eigenvector v the negation -v is also an eigenvector.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Derek Lim , Joshua Robinson , Stefanie Jegelka , Haggai Maron

Equivariant neural networks have proven to be effective for tasks with known underlying symmetries. However, optimizing equivariant networks can be tricky and best training practices are less established than for standard networks. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 YuQing Xie , Tess Smidt