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Related papers: Using and Abusing Equivariance

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Equivariances provide useful inductive biases in neural network modeling, with the translation equivariance of convolutional neural networks being a canonical example. Equivariances can be embedded in architectures through weight-sharing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tycho F. A. van der Ouderaa , David W. Romero , Mark van der Wilk

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

Using symmetry as an inductive bias in deep learning has been proven to be a principled approach for sample-efficient model design. However, the relationship between symmetry and the imperative for equivariance in neural networks is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Sékou-Oumar Kaba , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Equivariance is a nice property to have as it produces much more parameter efficient neural architectures and preserves the structure of the input through the feature mapping. Even though some combinations of transformations might never…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-02-11 David W. Romero , Mark Hoogendoorn

Equivariance of neural networks to transformations helps to improve their performance and reduce generalization error in computer vision tasks, as they apply to datasets presenting symmetries (e.g. scalings, rotations, translations). The…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Mateus Sangalli , Samy Blusseau , Santiago Velasco-Forero , Jesus Angulo

Incorporating symmetry as an inductive bias into neural network architecture has led to improvements in generalization, data efficiency, and physical consistency in dynamics modeling. Methods such as CNNs or equivariant neural networks use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Rui Wang , Robin Walters , Rose Yu

Incorporating equivariance to symmetry groups as a constraint during neural network training can improve performance and generalization for tasks exhibiting those symmetries, but such symmetries are often not perfectly nor explicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Kaitlin Maile , Dennis G. Wilson , Patrick Forré

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…

Invariances to translations have imbued convolutional neural networks with powerful generalization properties. However, we often do not know a priori what invariances are present in the data, or to what extent a model should be invariant to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Gregory Benton , Marc Finzi , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Group equivariant neural networks have been explored in the past few years and are interesting from theoretical and practical standpoints. They leverage concepts from group representation theory, non-commutative harmonic analysis and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Carlos Esteves

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

Convolutional neural networks have been extremely successful in the image recognition domain because they ensure equivariance to translations. There have been many recent attempts to generalize this framework to other domains, including…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-13 Risi Kondor , Shubhendu Trivedi

Given large datasets and sufficient compute, is it beneficial to design neural architectures for the structure and symmetries of each problem? Or is it more efficient to learn them from data? We study empirically how equivariant and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Johann Brehmer , Sönke Behrends , Pim de Haan , Taco Cohen

Convolutional neural networks often dominate fully-connected counterparts in generalization performance, especially on image classification tasks. This is often explained in terms of 'better inductive bias'. However, this has not been made…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Zhiyuan Li , Yi Zhang , Sanjeev Arora

The translational equivariant nature of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a reason for its great success in computer vision. However, networks do not enjoy more general equivariance properties such as rotation or scaling, ultimately…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Zikai Sun , Thierry Blu

Equivariance guarantees that a model's predictions capture key symmetries in data. When an image is translated or rotated, an equivariant model's representation of that image will translate or rotate accordingly. The success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Nate Gruver , Marc Finzi , Micah Goldblum , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Many successful deep learning architectures are equivariant to certain transformations in order to conserve parameters and improve generalization: most famously, convolution layers are equivariant to shifts of the input. This approach only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Allan Zhou , Tom Knowles , Chelsea Finn

In this work, we explore the trade-offs of explicit structural priors, particularly group equivariance. We address this through theoretical analysis and a comprehensive empirical study. To enable controlled and fair comparisons, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Sharvaree Vadgama , Mohammad Mohaiminul Islam , Domas Buracas , Christian Shewmake , Artem Moskalev , Erik Bekkers

Quantum neural network architectures that have little-to-no inductive biases are known to face trainability and generalization issues. Inspired by a similar problem, recent breakthroughs in machine learning address this challenge by…

The inclusion of symmetries as an inductive bias, known as equivariance, often improves generalization on geometric data (e.g. grids, sets, and graphs). However, equivariant architectures are usually highly constrained, designed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Abhinav Goel , Derek Lim , Hannah Lawrence , Stefanie Jegelka , Ningyuan Huang