David Eklund

Alison Pouplin, David Eklund, Carl Henrik Ek et al.

Riemannian geometry provides us with powerful tools to explore the latent space of generative models while preserving the underlying structure of the data. The latent space can be equipped it with a Riemannian metric, pulled back from the data manifold. With this metric, we can systematically navigate the space relying on geodesics defined as the shortest curves between two points. Generative models are often stochastic, causing the data space, the Riemannian metric, and the geodesics, to be stochastic as well. Stochastic objects are at best impractical, and at worst impossible, to manipulate. A common solution is to approximate the stochastic pullback metric by its expectation. But the geodesics derived from this expected Riemannian metric do not correspond to the expected length-minimising curves. In this work, we propose another metric whose geodesics explicitly minimise the expected length of the pullback metric. We show this metric defines a Finsler metric, and we compare it with the expected Riemannian metric. In high dimensions, we prove that both metrics converge to each other at a rate of $O\left(\frac{1}{D}\right)$. This convergence implies that the established expected Riemannian metric is an accurate approximation of the theoretically more grounded Finsler metric. This provides justification for using the expected Riemannian metric for practical implementations.

Jens Agerberg, Andrea Guidolin, Andrea Martinelli et al.

We propose a neural network architecture that can learn discriminative geometric representations of data from persistence diagrams, common descriptors of Topological Data Analysis. The learned representations enjoy Lipschitz stability with a controllable Lipschitz constant. In adversarial learning, this stability can be used to certify $ε$-robustness for samples in a dataset, which we demonstrate on the ORBIT5K dataset representing the orbits of a discrete dynamical system.

Dimitris Kalatzis, David Eklund, Georgios Arvanitidis et al.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) represent the given data in a low-dimensional latent space, which is generally assumed to be Euclidean. This assumption naturally leads to the common choice of a standard Gaussian prior over continuous latent variables. Recent work has, however, shown that this prior has a detrimental effect on model capacity, leading to subpar performance. We propose that the Euclidean assumption lies at the heart of this failure mode. To counter this, we assume a Riemannian structure over the latent space, which constitutes a more principled geometric view of the latent codes, and replace the standard Gaussian prior with a Riemannian Brownian motion prior. We propose an efficient inference scheme that does not rely on the unknown normalizing factor of this prior. Finally, we demonstrate that this prior significantly increases model capacity using only one additional scalar parameter.

David Eklund, Søren Hauberg

Manifold learning seeks a low dimensional representation that faithfully captures the essence of data. Current methods can successfully learn such representations, but do not provide a meaningful set of operations that are associated with the representation. Working towards operational representation learning, we endow the latent space of a large class of generative models with a random Riemannian metric, which provides us with elementary operators. As computational tools are unavailable for random Riemannian manifolds, we study deterministic approximations and derive tight error bounds on expected distances.