LGMar 2, 2022Code
A Simple and Universal Rotation Equivariant Point-cloud NetworkBen Finkelshtein, Chaim Baskin, Haggai Maron et al. · nvidia
Equivariance to permutations and rigid motions is an important inductive bias for various 3D learning problems. Recently it has been shown that the equivariant Tensor Field Network architecture is universal -- it can approximate any equivariant function. In this paper we suggest a much simpler architecture, prove that it enjoys the same universality guarantees and evaluate its performance on Modelnet40. The code to reproduce our experiments is available at \url{https://github.com/simpleinvariance/UniversalNetwork}
LGJul 2, 2024Code
On the Expressive Power of Sparse Geometric MPNNsYonatan Sverdlov, Nadav Dym
Motivated by applications in chemistry and other sciences, we study the expressive power of message-passing neural networks for geometric graphs, whose node features correspond to 3-dimensional positions. Recent work has shown that such models can separate generic pairs of non-isomorphic geometric graphs, though they may fail to separate some rare and complicated instances. However, these results assume a fully connected graph, where each node possesses complete knowledge of all other nodes. In contrast, often, in application, every node only possesses knowledge of a small number of nearest neighbors. This paper shows that generic pairs of non-isomorphic geometric graphs can be separated by message-passing networks with rotation equivariant features as long as the underlying graph is connected. When only invariant intermediate features are allowed, generic separation is guaranteed for generically globally rigid graphs. We introduce a simple architecture, EGENNET, which achieves our theoretical guarantees and compares favorably with alternative architecture on synthetic and chemical benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/yonatansverdlov/E-GenNet.
LGMay 5, 2022
Low Dimensional Invariant Embeddings for Universal Geometric LearningNadav Dym, Steven J. Gortler
This paper studies separating invariants: mappings on $D$ dimensional domains which are invariant to an appropriate group action, and which separate orbits. The motivation for this study comes from the usefulness of separating invariants in proving universality of equivariant neural network architectures. We observe that in several cases the cardinality of separating invariants proposed in the machine learning literature is much larger than the dimension $D$. As a result, the theoretical universal constructions based on these separating invariants is unrealistically large. Our goal in this paper is to resolve this issue. We show that when a continuous family of semi-algebraic separating invariants is available, separation can be obtained by randomly selecting $2D+1 $ of these invariants. We apply this methodology to obtain an efficient scheme for computing separating invariants for several classical group actions which have been studied in the invariant learning literature. Examples include matrix multiplication actions on point clouds by permutations, rotations, and various other linear groups. Often the requirement of invariant separation is relaxed and only generic separation is required. In this case, we show that only $D+1$ invariants are required. More importantly, generic invariants are often significantly easier to compute, as we illustrate by discussing generic and full separation for weighted graphs. Finally we outline an approach for proving that separating invariants can be constructed also when the random parameters have finite precision.
LGJun 10, 2023
Neural Injective Functions for Multisets, Measures and Graphs via a Finite Witness TheoremTal Amir, Steven J. Gortler, Ilai Avni et al.
Injective multiset functions have a key role in the theoretical study of machine learning on multisets and graphs. Yet, there remains a gap between the provably injective multiset functions considered in theory, which typically rely on polynomial moments, and the multiset functions used in practice, which rely on $\textit{neural moments}$ $\unicode{x2014}$ whose injectivity on multisets has not been studied to date. In this paper, we bridge this gap by showing that moments of neural networks do define injective multiset functions, provided that an analytic non-polynomial activation is used. The number of moments required by our theory is optimal essentially up to a multiplicative factor of two. To prove this result, we state and prove a $\textit{finite witness theorem}$, which is of independent interest. As a corollary to our main theorem, we derive new approximation results for functions on multisets and measures, and new separation results for graph neural networks. We also provide two negative results: (1) moments of piecewise-linear neural networks cannot be injective multiset functions; and (2) even when moment-based multiset functions are injective, they can never be bi-Lipschitz.
LGOct 20, 2023
Equivariant Deep Weight Space AlignmentAviv Navon, Aviv Shamsian, Ethan Fetaya et al.
Permutation symmetries of deep networks make basic operations like model merging and similarity estimation challenging. In many cases, aligning the weights of the networks, i.e., finding optimal permutations between their weights, is necessary. Unfortunately, weight alignment is an NP-hard problem. Prior research has mainly focused on solving relaxed versions of the alignment problem, leading to either time-consuming methods or sub-optimal solutions. To accelerate the alignment process and improve its quality, we propose a novel framework aimed at learning to solve the weight alignment problem, which we name Deep-Align. To that end, we first prove that weight alignment adheres to two fundamental symmetries and then, propose a deep architecture that respects these symmetries. Notably, our framework does not require any labeled data. We provide a theoretical analysis of our approach and evaluate Deep-Align on several types of network architectures and learning setups. Our experimental results indicate that a feed-forward pass with Deep-Align produces better or equivalent alignments compared to those produced by current optimization algorithms. Additionally, our alignments can be used as an effective initialization for other methods, leading to improved solutions with a significant speedup in convergence.
LGJan 31, 2023
Complete Neural Networks for Complete Euclidean GraphsSnir Hordan, Tal Amir, Steven J. Gortler et al.
Neural networks for point clouds, which respect their natural invariance to permutation and rigid motion, have enjoyed recent success in modeling geometric phenomena, from molecular dynamics to recommender systems. Yet, to date, no model with polynomial complexity is known to be complete, that is, able to distinguish between any pair of non-isomorphic point clouds. We fill this theoretical gap by showing that point clouds can be completely determined, up to permutation and rigid motion, by applying the 3-WL graph isomorphism test to the point cloud's centralized Gram matrix. Moreover, we formulate an Euclidean variant of the 2-WL test and show that it is also sufficient to achieve completeness. We then show how our complete Euclidean WL tests can be simulated by an Euclidean graph neural network of moderate size and demonstrate their separation capability on highly symmetrical point clouds.
LGMay 10Code
When and How to Canonize: A Generalization PerspectiveYonatan Sverdlov, Benjamin Friedman, Snir Hordan et al.
While invariant architectures are standard for processing symmetric data, there is growing interest in achieving invariance by applying group averaging or canonization to non-invariant backbones. However, the theoretical generalization properties of these alternative strategies remain poorly understood. We introduce a theoretical framework to analyze the generalization error of these methods by bounding their covering numbers. We establish a rigorous generalization hierarchy: the error bounds of canonized models are at best equal to the error bounds of structurally invariant and group-averaged models, and at worst equal to the bounds of non-invariant baselines. Furthermore, we show that there exist optimal canonizations which attain the optimal error bounds, and poor canonizations which attain the non-invariant error bounds, and that this depends on the regularity of the canonization. Finally, applying this framework to permutation groups in point cloud processing, we rigorously prove that the covering number of lexicographical sorting grows exponentially with point cloud dimension, whereas Hilbert curve canonization guarantees polynomial growth. This provides the first formal theoretical justification for the empirical success of Hilbert curve serialization in state-of-the-art point cloud architectures. We conclude with experiments that support our theoretical claims. Code is available at https://github.com/yonatansverdlov/Canonization
LGMay 22
Weisfeiler-Leman Is Incomplete on Simple Spectrum Graphs, so Canonicalize ThemSnir Hordan, Nadav Dym, Tim Seppelt
Graphs with a simple spectrum admit cubic-time isomorphism testing, yet we prove that for every natural number $k$, the $k$-Weisfeiler-Leman ($k$-WL) test cannot distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs with a simple spectrum. As the WL hierarchy upper-bounds the distinguishing power of widely-used Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), this incompleteness applies to all such GNNs, ruling out completeness for every $k$-WL-aligned GNN family. To close this gap, we introduce PRiSM (Partition, Refine, Solve, Match), the first provably complete canonicalization of simple-spectrum eigendecompositions. PRiSM obtains the completeness guarantee that prior canonicalizations provably lack, and resolves the open problem of achieving complete expressivity on simple-spectrum graphs. When composed with DeepSets or a Transformer, PRiSM achieves universal approximation on simple-spectrum graphs, justifying the use of canonicalized Laplacian positional encodings. Empirically, PRiSM performs comparably to or outperforms existing spectral canonicalizations on graph regression, classification, and expressivity
LGJul 18, 2022
Symmetrized Robust Procrustes: Constant-Factor Approximation and Exact RecoveryTal Amir, Shahar Kovalsky, Nadav Dym
The classical $\textit{Procrustes}$ problem is to find a rigid motion (orthogonal transformation and translation) that best aligns two given point-sets in the least-squares sense. The $\textit{Robust Procrustes}$ problem is an important variant, in which a power-1 objective is used instead of least squares to improve robustness to outliers. While the optimal solution of the least-squares problem can be easily computed in closed form, dating back to Schönemann (1966), no such solution is known for the power-1 problem. In this paper we propose a novel convex relaxation for the Robust Procrustes problem. Our relaxation enjoys several theoretical and practical advantages: Theoretically, we prove that our method provides a $\sqrt{2}$-factor approximation to the Robust Procrustes problem, and that, under appropriate assumptions, it exactly recovers the true rigid motion from point correspondences contaminated by outliers. In practice, we find in numerical experiments on both synthetic and real robust Procrustes problems, that our method performs similarly to the standard Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS). However the convexity of our algorithm allows incorporating additional convex penalties, which are not readily amenable to IRLS. This turns out to be a substantial advantage, leading to improved results in high-dimensional problems, including non-rigid shape alignment and semi-supervised interlingual word translation.
LGFeb 23
Quantitative Approximation Rates for Group Equivariant LearningJonathan W. Siegel, Snir Hordan, Hannah Lawrence et al.
The universal approximation theorem establishes that neural networks can approximate any continuous function on a compact set. Later works in approximation theory provide quantitative approximation rates for ReLU networks on the class of $α$-Hölder functions $f: [0,1]^N \to \mathbb{R}$. The goal of this paper is to provide similar quantitative approximation results in the context of group equivariant learning, where the learned $α$-Hölder function is known to obey certain group symmetries. While there has been much interest in the literature in understanding the universal approximation properties of equivariant models, very few quantitative approximation results are known for equivariant models. In this paper, we bridge this gap by deriving quantitative approximation rates for several prominent group-equivariant and invariant architectures. The architectures that we consider include: the permutation-invariant Deep Sets architecture; the permutation-equivariant Sumformer and Transformer architectures; joint invariance to permutations and rigid motions using invariant networks based on frame averaging; and general bi-Lipschitz invariant models. Overall, we show that equally-sized ReLU MLPs and equivariant architectures are equally expressive over equivariant functions. Thus, hard-coding equivariance does not result in a loss of expressivity or approximation power in these models.
LGFeb 11
Transport, Don't Generate: Deterministic Geometric Flows for Combinatorial OptimizationBenjy Friedmann, Nadav Dym
Recent advances in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) have been dominated by diffusion models that treat the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) as a stochastic $N \times N$ heatmap generation task. In this paper, we propose CycFlow, a framework that replaces iterative edge denoising with deterministic point transport. CycFlow learns an instance-conditioned vector field that continuously transports input 2D coordinates to a canonical circular arrangement, where the optimal tour is recovered from this $2N$ dimensional representation via angular sorting. By leveraging data-dependent flow matching, we bypass the quadratic bottleneck of edge scoring in favor of linear coordinate dynamics. This paradigm shift accelerates solving speed by up to three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art diffusion baselines, while maintaining competitive optimality gaps.
CVNov 13, 2025
Toward bilipshiz geometric modelsYonatan Sverdlov, Eitan Rosen, Nadav Dym
Many neural networks for point clouds are, by design, invariant to the symmetries of this datatype: permutations and rigid motions. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether such networks preserve natural symmetry aware distances on the point cloud spaces, through the notion of bi-Lipschitz equivalence. This inquiry is motivated by recent work in the Equivariant learning literature which highlights the advantages of bi-Lipschitz models in other scenarios. We consider two symmetry aware metrics on point clouds: (a) The Procrustes Matching (PM) metric and (b) Hard Gromov Wasserstien distances. We show that these two distances themselves are not bi-Lipschitz equivalent, and as a corollary deduce that popular invariant networks for point clouds are not bi-Lipschitz with respect to the PM metric. We then show how these networks can be modified so that they do obtain bi-Lipschitz guarantees. Finally, we provide initial experiments showing the advantage of the proposed bi-Lipschitz model over standard invariant models, for the tasks of finding correspondences between 3D point clouds.
LGOct 24, 2025Code
Monotone and Separable Set Functions: Characterizations and Neural ModelsSoutrik Sarangi, Yonatan Sverdlov, Nadav Dym et al.
Motivated by applications for set containment problems, we consider the following fundamental problem: can we design set-to-vector functions so that the natural partial order on sets is preserved, namely $S\subseteq T \text{ if and only if } F(S)\leq F(T) $. We call functions satisfying this property Monotone and Separating (MAS) set functions. % We establish lower and upper bounds for the vector dimension necessary to obtain MAS functions, as a function of the cardinality of the multisets and the underlying ground set. In the important case of an infinite ground set, we show that MAS functions do not exist, but provide a model called our which provably enjoys a relaxed MAS property we name "weakly MAS" and is stable in the sense of Holder continuity. We also show that MAS functions can be used to construct universal models that are monotone by construction and can approximate all monotone set functions. Experimentally, we consider a variety of set containment tasks. The experiments show the benefit of using our our model, in comparison with standard set models which do not incorporate set containment as an inductive bias. Our code is available in https://github.com/yonatansverdlov/Monotone-Embedding.
LGFeb 25, 2024
Equivariant Frames and the Impossibility of Continuous CanonicalizationNadav Dym, Hannah Lawrence, Jonathan W. Siegel
Canonicalization provides an architecture-agnostic method for enforcing equivariance, with generalizations such as frame-averaging recently gaining prominence as a lightweight and flexible alternative to equivariant architectures. Recent works have found an empirical benefit to using probabilistic frames instead, which learn weighted distributions over group elements. In this work, we provide strong theoretical justification for this phenomenon: for commonly-used groups, there is no efficiently computable choice of frame that preserves continuity of the function being averaged. In other words, unweighted frame-averaging can turn a smooth, non-symmetric function into a discontinuous, symmetric function. To address this fundamental robustness problem, we formally define and construct \emph{weighted} frames, which provably preserve continuity, and demonstrate their utility by constructing efficient and continuous weighted frames for the actions of $SO(2)$, $SO(3)$, and $S_n$ on point clouds.
LGFeb 4, 2024
Weisfeiler Leman for Euclidean Equivariant Machine LearningSnir Hordan, Tal Amir, Nadav Dym
The $k$-Weisfeiler-Leman ($k$-WL) graph isomorphism test hierarchy is a common method for assessing the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs). Recently, GNNs whose expressive power is equivalent to the $2$-WL test were proven to be universal on weighted graphs which encode $3\mathrm{D}$ point cloud data, yet this result is limited to invariant continuous functions on point clouds. In this paper, we extend this result in three ways: Firstly, we show that PPGN can simulate $2$-WL uniformly on all point clouds with low complexity. Secondly, we show that $2$-WL tests can be extended to point clouds which include both positions and velocities, a scenario often encountered in applications. Finally, we provide a general framework for proving equivariant universality and leverage it to prove that a simple modification of this invariant PPGN architecture can be used to obtain a universal equivariant architecture that can approximate all continuous equivariant functions uniformly. Building on our results, we develop our WeLNet architecture, which sets new state-of-the-art results on the N-Body dynamics task and the GEOM-QM9 molecular conformation generation task.
LGApr 3, 2025
Fourier Sliced-Wasserstein Embedding for Multisets and MeasuresTal Amir, Nadav Dym
We present the Fourier Sliced-Wasserstein (FSW) embedding - a novel method to embed multisets and measures over $\mathbb{R}^d$ into Euclidean space. Our proposed embedding approximately preserves the sliced Wasserstein distance on distributions, thereby yielding geometrically meaningful representations that better capture the structure of the input. Moreover, it is injective on measures and bi-Lipschitz on multisets - a significant advantage over prevalent methods based on sum- or max-pooling, which are provably not bi-Lipschitz, and, in many cases, not even injective. The required output dimension for these guarantees is near-optimal: roughly $2 N d$, where $N$ is the maximal input multiset size. Furthermore, we prove that it is impossible to embed distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$ into Euclidean space in a bi-Lipschitz manner. Thus, the metric properties of our embedding are, in a sense, the best possible. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method yields superior multiset representations that improve performance in practical learning tasks. Specifically, we show that (a) a simple combination of the FSW embedding with an MLP achieves state-of-the-art performance in learning the (non-sliced) Wasserstein distance; and (b) replacing max-pooling with the FSW embedding makes PointNet significantly more robust to parameter reduction, with only minor performance degradation even after a 40-fold reduction.
LGFeb 3, 2024
Future Directions in the Theory of Graph Machine LearningChristopher Morris, Fabrizio Frasca, Nadav Dym et al. · nvidia
Machine learning on graphs, especially using graph neural networks (GNNs), has seen a surge in interest due to the wide availability of graph data across a broad spectrum of disciplines, from life to social and engineering sciences. Despite their practical success, our theoretical understanding of the properties of GNNs remains highly incomplete. Recent theoretical advancements primarily focus on elucidating the coarse-grained expressive power of GNNs, predominantly employing combinatorial techniques. However, these studies do not perfectly align with practice, particularly in understanding the generalization behavior of GNNs when trained with stochastic first-order optimization techniques. In this position paper, we argue that the graph machine learning community needs to shift its attention to developing a balanced theory of graph machine learning, focusing on a more thorough understanding of the interplay of expressive power, generalization, and optimization.
LGMar 6, 2025
Bi-Lipschitz Ansatz for Anti-Symmetric FunctionsNadav Dym, Jianfeng Lu, Matan Mizrachi
Motivated by applications for simulating quantum many body functions, we propose a new universal ansatz for approximating anti-symmetric functions. The main advantage of this ansatz over previous alternatives is that it is bi-Lipschitz with respect to a naturally defined metric. As a result, we are able to obtain quantitative approximation results for approximation of Lipschitz continuous antisymmetric functions. Moreover, we provide preliminary experimental evidence to the improved performance of this ansatz for learning antisymmetric functions.
LGOct 25, 2025
Quantitative Bounds for Sorting-Based Permutation-Invariant EmbeddingsNadav Dym, Matthias Wellershoff, Efstratios Tsoukanis et al.
We study the sorting-based embedding $β_{\mathbf A} : \mathbb R^{n \times d} \to \mathbb R^{n \times D}$, $\mathbf X \mapsto {\downarrow}(\mathbf X \mathbf A)$, where $\downarrow$ denotes column wise sorting of matrices. Such embeddings arise in graph deep learning where outputs should be invariant to permutations of graph nodes. Previous work showed that for large enough $D$ and appropriate $\mathbf A$, the mapping $β_{\mathbf A}$ is injective, and moreover satisfies a bi-Lipschitz condition. However, two gaps remain: firstly, the optimal size $D$ required for injectivity is not yet known, and secondly, no estimates of the bi-Lipschitz constants of the mapping are known. In this paper, we make substantial progress in addressing both of these gaps. Regarding the first gap, we improve upon the best known upper bounds for the embedding dimension $D$ necessary for injectivity, and also provide a lower bound on the minimal injectivity dimension. Regarding the second gap, we construct matrices $\mathbf A$, so that the bi-Lipschitz distortion of $β_{\mathbf A} $ depends quadratically on $n$, and is completely independent of $d$. We also show that the distortion of $β_{\mathbf A}$ is necessarily at least in $Ω(\sqrt{n})$. Finally, we provide similar results for variants of $β_{\mathbf A}$ obtained by applying linear projections to reduce the output dimension of $β_{\mathbf A}$.
LGJun 5, 2025
Spectral Graph Neural Networks are Incomplete on Graphs with a Simple SpectrumSnir Hordan, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Gur Lifshitz et al.
Spectral features are widely incorporated within Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve their expressive power, or their ability to distinguish among non-isomorphic graphs. One popular example is the usage of graph Laplacian eigenvectors for positional encoding in MPNNs and Graph Transformers. The expressive power of such Spectrally-enhanced GNNs (SGNNs) is usually evaluated via the k-WL graph isomorphism test hierarchy and homomorphism counting. Yet, these frameworks align poorly with the graph spectra, yielding limited insight into SGNNs' expressive power. We leverage a well-studied paradigm of classifying graphs by their largest eigenvalue multiplicity to introduce an expressivity hierarchy for SGNNs. We then prove that many SGNNs are incomplete even on graphs with distinct eigenvalues. To mitigate this deficiency, we adapt rotation equivariant neural networks to the graph spectra setting to propose a method to provably improve SGNNs' expressivity on simple spectrum graphs. We empirically verify our theoretical claims via an image classification experiment on the MNIST Superpixel dataset and eigenvector canonicalization on graphs from ZINC.
LGNov 25, 2025
Short-Range OversquashingYaaqov Mishayev, Yonatan Sverdlov, Tal Amir et al.
Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are widely used for learning on graphs, but their ability to process long-range information is limited by the phenomenon of oversquashing. This limitation has led some researchers to advocate Graph Transformers as a better alternative, whereas others suggest that it can be mitigated within the MPNN framework, using virtual nodes or other rewiring techniques. In this work, we demonstrate that oversquashing is not limited to long-range tasks, but can also arise in short-range problems. This observation allows us to disentangle two distinct mechanisms underlying oversquashing: (1) the bottleneck phenomenon, which can arise even in low-range settings, and (2) the vanishing gradient phenomenon, which is closely associated with long-range tasks. We further show that the short-range bottleneck effect is not captured by existing explanations for oversquashing, and that adding virtual nodes does not resolve it. In contrast, transformers do succeed in such tasks, positioning them as the more compelling solution to oversquashing, compared to specialized MPNNs.
LGJun 11, 2024
On the Hölder Stability of Multiset and Graph Neural NetworksYair Davidson, Nadav Dym
Extensive research efforts have been put into characterizing and constructing maximally separating multiset and graph neural networks. However, recent empirical evidence suggests the notion of separation itself doesn't capture several interesting phenomena. On the one hand, the quality of this separation may be very weak, to the extent that the embeddings of "separable" objects might even be considered identical when using fixed finite precision. On the other hand, architectures which aren't capable of separation in theory, somehow achieve separation when taking the network to be wide enough. In this work, we address both of these issues, by proposing a novel pair-wise separation quality analysis framework which is based on an adaptation of Lipschitz and \Holder{} stability to parametric functions. The proposed framework, which we name \emph{\Holder{} in expectation}, allows for separation quality analysis, without restricting the analysis to embeddings that can separate all the input space simultaneously. We prove that common sum-based models are lower-\Holder{} in expectation, with an exponent that decays rapidly with the network's depth . Our analysis leads to adversarial examples of graphs which can be separated by three 1-WL iterations, but cannot be separated in practice by standard maximally powerful Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). To remedy this, we propose two novel MPNNs with improved separation quality, one of which is lower Lipschitz in expectation. We show these MPNNs can easily classify our adversarial examples, and compare favorably with standard MPNNs on standard graph learning tasks.
LGJul 28, 2021
Neural Network Approximation of Refinable FunctionsIngrid Daubechies, Ronald DeVore, Nadav Dym et al.
In the desire to quantify the success of neural networks in deep learning and other applications, there is a great interest in understanding which functions are efficiently approximated by the outputs of neural networks. By now, there exists a variety of results which show that a wide range of functions can be approximated with sometimes surprising accuracy by these outputs. For example, it is known that the set of functions that can be approximated with exponential accuracy (in terms of the number of parameters used) includes, on one hand, very smooth functions such as polynomials and analytic functions (see e.g. \cite{E,S,Y}) and, on the other hand, very rough functions such as the Weierstrass function (see e.g. \cite{EPGB,DDFHP}), which is nowhere differentiable. In this paper, we add to the latter class of rough functions by showing that it also includes refinable functions. Namely, we show that refinable functions are approximated by the outputs of deep ReLU networks with a fixed width and increasing depth with accuracy exponential in terms of their number of parameters. Our results apply to functions used in the standard construction of wavelets as well as to functions constructed via subdivision algorithms in Computer Aided Geometric Design.
LGOct 6, 2020
On the Universality of Rotation Equivariant Point Cloud NetworksNadav Dym, Haggai Maron
Learning functions on point clouds has applications in many fields, including computer vision, computer graphics, physics, and chemistry. Recently, there has been a growing interest in neural architectures that are invariant or equivariant to all three shape-preserving transformations of point clouds: translation, rotation, and permutation. In this paper, we present a first study of the approximation power of these architectures. We first derive two sufficient conditions for an equivariant architecture to have the universal approximation property, based on a novel characterization of the space of equivariant polynomials. We then use these conditions to show that two recently suggested models are universal, and for devising two other novel universal architectures.
LGMay 27, 2019
Expression of Fractals Through Neural Network FunctionsNadav Dym, Barak Sober, Ingrid Daubechies
To help understand the underlying mechanisms of neural networks (NNs), several groups have, in recent years, studied the number of linear regions $\ell$ of piecewise linear functions generated by deep neural networks (DNN). In particular, they showed that $\ell$ can grow exponentially with the number of network parameters $p$, a property often used to explain the advantages of DNNs over shallow NNs in approximating complicated functions. Nonetheless, a simple dimension argument shows that DNNs cannot generate all piecewise linear functions with $\ell$ linear regions as soon as $\ell > p$. It is thus natural to seek to characterize specific families of functions with $\ell$ linear regions that can be constructed by DNNs. Iterated Function Systems (IFS) generate sequences of piecewise linear functions $F_k$ with a number of linear regions exponential in $k$. We show that, under mild assumptions, $F_k$ can be generated by a NN using only $\mathcal{O}(k)$ parameters. IFS are used extensively to generate, at low computational cost, natural-looking landscape textures in artificial images. They have also been proposed for compression of natural images, albeit with less commercial success. The surprisingly good performance of this fractal-based compression suggests that our visual system may lock in, to some extent, on self-similarities in images. The combination of this phenomenon with the capacity, demonstrated here, of DNNs to efficiently approximate IFS may contribute to the success of DNNs, particularly striking for image processing tasks, as well as suggest new algorithms for representing self similarities in images based on the DNN mechanism.
CGApr 3, 2019
Linearly Converging Quasi Branch and Bound Algorithms for Global Rigid RegistrationNadav Dym, Shahar Ziv Kovalsky
In recent years, several branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithms have been proposed to globally optimize rigid registration problems. In this paper, we suggest a general framework to improve upon the BnB approach, which we name Quasi BnB. Quasi BnB replaces the linear lower bounds used in BnB algorithms with quadratic quasi-lower bounds which are based on the quadratic behavior of the energy in the vicinity of the global minimum. While quasi-lower bounds are not truly lower bounds, the Quasi-BnB algorithm is globally optimal. In fact we prove that it exhibits linear convergence -- it achieves $ε$-accuracy in $~O(\log(1/ε)) $ time while the time complexity of other rigid registration BnB algorithms is polynomial in $1/ε$. Our experiments verify that Quasi-BnB is significantly more efficient than state-of-the-art BnB algorithms, especially for problems where high accuracy is desired.