A Characterization Theorem for Equivariant Networks with Point-wise Activations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pacini, Marco, Dong, Xiaowen, Lepri, Bruno, Santin, Gabriele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866914643519209472
author Pacini, Marco
Dong, Xiaowen
Lepri, Bruno
Santin, Gabriele
author_facet Pacini, Marco
Dong, Xiaowen
Lepri, Bruno
Santin, Gabriele
contents Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations, such as ReLU, are not equivariant, hence they cannot be employed in the design of equivariant neural networks. The theorem we present in this paper describes all possible combinations of finite-dimensional representations, choice of coordinates and point-wise activations to obtain an exactly equivariant layer, generalizing and strengthening existing characterizations. Notable cases of practical relevance are discussed as corollaries. Indeed, we prove that rotation-equivariant networks can only be invariant, as it happens for any network which is equivariant with respect to connected compact groups. Then, we discuss implications of our findings when applied to important instances of exactly equivariant networks. First, we completely characterize permutation equivariant networks such as Invariant Graph Networks with point-wise nonlinearities and their geometric counterparts, highlighting a plethora of models whose expressive power and performance are still unknown. Second, we show that feature spaces of disentangled steerable convolutional neural networks are trivial representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_09235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Characterization Theorem for Equivariant Networks with Point-wise Activations
Pacini, Marco
Dong, Xiaowen
Lepri, Bruno
Santin, Gabriele
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations, such as ReLU, are not equivariant, hence they cannot be employed in the design of equivariant neural networks. The theorem we present in this paper describes all possible combinations of finite-dimensional representations, choice of coordinates and point-wise activations to obtain an exactly equivariant layer, generalizing and strengthening existing characterizations. Notable cases of practical relevance are discussed as corollaries. Indeed, we prove that rotation-equivariant networks can only be invariant, as it happens for any network which is equivariant with respect to connected compact groups. Then, we discuss implications of our findings when applied to important instances of exactly equivariant networks. First, we completely characterize permutation equivariant networks such as Invariant Graph Networks with point-wise nonlinearities and their geometric counterparts, highlighting a plethora of models whose expressive power and performance are still unknown. Second, we show that feature spaces of disentangled steerable convolutional neural networks are trivial representations.
title A Characterization Theorem for Equivariant Networks with Point-wise Activations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09235