xPerT: Extended Persistence Transformer
This addresses the problem of efficiently using topological data in machine learning for researchers and practitioners, offering a scalable and user-friendly solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of incorporating persistence diagrams into machine learning by proposing xPerT, a novel transformer architecture that reduces GPU memory usage by over 90% and improves accuracy on multiple datasets.
A persistence diagram provides a compact summary of persistent homology, which captures the topological features of a space at different scales. However, due to its nature as a set, incorporating it as a feature into a machine learning framework is challenging. Several methods have been proposed to use persistence diagrams as input for machine learning models, but they often require complex preprocessing steps and extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer architecture called the \textit{Extended Persistence Transformer (xPerT)}, which is highly scalable than the compared to Persformer, an existing transformer for persistence diagrams. xPerT reduces GPU memory usage by over 90\% and improves accuracy on multiple datasets. Additionally, xPerT does not require complex preprocessing steps or extensive hyperparameter tuning, making it easy to use in practice. Our code is available at https://github.com/sehunfromdaegu/xpert.