Neural Operator-Grounded Continuous Tensor Function Representation and Its Applications
This work addresses a bottleneck in tensor representation for researchers and practitioners in machine learning and data science, offering a novel approach that is incremental in advancing continuous tensor methods.
The paper tackles the limitation of current continuous tensor function representations by introducing neural operator-grounded mode-n operators as a continuous and nonlinear alternative to discrete linear mode-n products, resulting in a representation that more faithfully models complex real-world data and demonstrates superiority in multi-dimensional data completion experiments across various data types.
Recently, continuous tensor functions have attracted increasing attention, because they can unifiedly represent data both on mesh grids and beyond mesh grids. However, since mode-$n$ product is essentially discrete and linear, the potential of current continuous tensor function representations is still locked. To break this bottleneck, we suggest neural operator-grounded mode-$n$ operators as a continuous and nonlinear alternative of discrete and linear mode-$n$ product. Instead of mapping the discrete core tensor to the discrete target tensor, proposed mode-$n$ operator directly maps the continuous core tensor function to the continuous target tensor function, which provides a genuine continuous representation of real-world data and can ameliorate discretization artifacts. Empowering with continuous and nonlinear mode-$n$ operators, we propose a neural operator-grounded continuous tensor function representation (abbreviated as NO-CTR), which can more faithfully represent complex real-world data compared with classic discrete tensor representations and continuous tensor function representations. Theoretically, we also prove that any continuous tensor function can be approximated by NO-CTR. To examine the capability of NO-CTR, we suggest an NO-CTR-based multi-dimensional data completion model. Extensive experiments across various data on regular mesh grids (multi-spectral images and color videos), on mesh girds with different resolutions (Sentinel-2 images) and beyond mesh grids (point clouds) demonstrate the superiority of NO-CTR.