David R. Wessels

CV
h-index31
5papers
27citations
Novelty47%
AI Score41

5 Papers

CVSep 3, 2024
The NGT200 Dataset: Geometric Multi-View Isolated Sign Recognition

Oline Ranum, David R. Wessels, Gomer Otterspeer et al.

Sign Language Processing (SLP) provides a foundation for a more inclusive future in language technology; however, the field faces several significant challenges that must be addressed to achieve practical, real-world applications. This work addresses multi-view isolated sign recognition (MV-ISR), and highlights the essential role of 3D awareness and geometry in SLP systems. We introduce the NGT200 dataset, a novel spatio-temporal multi-view benchmark, establishing MV-ISR as distinct from single-view ISR (SV-ISR). We demonstrate the benefits of synthetic data and propose conditioning sign representations on spatial symmetries inherent in sign language. Leveraging an SE(2) equivariant model improves MV-ISR performance by 8%-22% over the baseline.

37.9CEMay 19
Uncertainty-aware Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials via Learned Functional Perturbations

Olga Zaghen, Maksim Zhdanov, Dario Coscia et al.

Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials (MLIPs) achieve near ab initio accuracy at a fraction of the cost of quantum-mechanical simulations, yet they remain prone to silent failures on out-of-distribution configurations, making principled uncertainty quantification (UQ) essential for error-aware simulations and active learning. Existing non-ensemble UQ methods for MLIPs rely either on variational inference or on parametric distributional assumptions, both of which add architectural complexity and hyper-parameters that must be tuned per task. Inspired by recent advances in probabilistic weather forecasting, we propose a simpler alternative: turn a deterministic MLIP into a probabilistic one through learned functional perturbations and finetune it end-to-end with the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), a proper scoring rule. We validate the approach with an equivariant GNN (P-EGNN) trained from scratch and by finetuning the foundation model the Orb-v3 for silica. On the N-body charged particle benchmark, P-EGNN improves CRPS over the state-of-the-art Bayesian MLIP method BLIP by 19-32% across all training sizes; on silica, P-Orb raises the Spearman correlation between predicted uncertainty and actual error from 0.75 (BLIP-Orb) to 0.84.

CVOct 3, 2025
Platonic Transformers: A Solid Choice For Equivariance

Mohammad Mohaiminul Islam, Rishabh Anand, David R. Wessels et al.

While widespread, Transformers lack inductive biases for geometric symmetries common in science and computer vision. Existing equivariant methods often sacrifice the efficiency and flexibility that make Transformers so effective through complex, computationally intensive designs. We introduce the Platonic Transformer to resolve this trade-off. By defining attention relative to reference frames from the Platonic solid symmetry groups, our method induces a principled weight-sharing scheme. This enables combined equivariance to continuous translations and Platonic symmetries, while preserving the exact architecture and computational cost of a standard Transformer. Furthermore, we show that this attention is formally equivalent to a dynamic group convolution, which reveals that the model learns adaptive geometric filters and enables a highly scalable, linear-time convolutional variant. Across diverse benchmarks in computer vision (CIFAR-10), 3D point clouds (ScanObjectNN), and molecular property prediction (QM9, OMol25), the Platonic Transformer achieves competitive performance by leveraging these geometric constraints at no additional cost.

LGMay 21, 2025
Equivariant Eikonal Neural Networks: Grid-Free, Scalable Travel-Time Prediction on Homogeneous Spaces

Alejandro García-Castellanos, David R. Wessels, Nicky J. van den Berg et al.

We introduce Equivariant Neural Eikonal Solvers, a novel framework that integrates Equivariant Neural Fields (ENFs) with Neural Eikonal Solvers. Our approach employs a single neural field where a unified shared backbone is conditioned on signal-specific latent variables - represented as point clouds in a Lie group - to model diverse Eikonal solutions. The ENF integration ensures equivariant mapping from these latent representations to the solution field, delivering three key benefits: enhanced representation efficiency through weight-sharing, robust geometric grounding, and solution steerability. This steerability allows transformations applied to the latent point cloud to induce predictable, geometrically meaningful modifications in the resulting Eikonal solution. By coupling these steerable representations with Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), our framework accurately models Eikonal travel-time solutions while generalizing to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds with regular group actions. This includes homogeneous spaces such as Euclidean, position-orientation, spherical, and hyperbolic manifolds. We validate our approach through applications in seismic travel-time modeling of 2D, 3D, and spherical benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance, scalability, adaptability, and user controllability compared to existing Neural Operator-based Eikonal solver methods.

LGJun 10, 2024
Space-Time Continuous PDE Forecasting using Equivariant Neural Fields

David M. Knigge, David R. Wessels, Riccardo Valperga et al.

Recently, Conditional Neural Fields (NeFs) have emerged as a powerful modelling paradigm for PDEs, by learning solutions as flows in the latent space of the Conditional NeF. Although benefiting from favourable properties of NeFs such as grid-agnosticity and space-time-continuous dynamics modelling, this approach limits the ability to impose known constraints of the PDE on the solutions -- e.g. symmetries or boundary conditions -- in favour of modelling flexibility. Instead, we propose a space-time continuous NeF-based solving framework that - by preserving geometric information in the latent space - respects known symmetries of the PDE. We show that modelling solutions as flows of pointclouds over the group of interest $G$ improves generalization and data-efficiency. We validated that our framework readily generalizes to unseen spatial and temporal locations, as well as geometric transformations of the initial conditions - where other NeF-based PDE forecasting methods fail - and improve over baselines in a number of challenging geometries.