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Main Authors: Zeng, Sebastian, Graf, Florian, Uray, Martin, Huber, Stefan, Kwitt, Roland
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15732
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author Zeng, Sebastian
Graf, Florian
Uray, Martin
Huber, Stefan
Kwitt, Roland
author_facet Zeng, Sebastian
Graf, Florian
Uray, Martin
Huber, Stefan
Kwitt, Roland
contents We consider the problem of learning the dynamics in the topology of time-evolving point clouds, the prevalent spatiotemporal model for systems exhibiting collective behavior, such as swarms of insects and birds or particles in physics. In such systems, patterns emerge from (local) interactions among self-propelled entities. While several well-understood governing equations for motion and interaction exist, they are notoriously difficult to fit to data, as most prior work requires knowledge about individual motion trajectories, i.e., a requirement that is challenging to satisfy with an increasing number of entities. To evade such confounding factors, we investigate collective behavior from a $\textit{topological perspective}$, but instead of summarizing entire observation sequences (as done previously), we propose learning a latent dynamical model from topological features $\textit{per time point}$. The latter is then used to formulate a downstream regression task to predict the parametrization of some a priori specified governing equation. We implement this idea based on a latent ODE learned from vectorized (static) persistence diagrams and show that a combination of recent stability results for persistent homology justifies this modeling choice. Various (ablation) experiments not only demonstrate the relevance of each model component but provide compelling empirical evidence that our proposed model - $\textit{Neural Persistence Dynamics}$ - substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art across a diverse set of parameter regression tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15732
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Persistence Dynamics
Zeng, Sebastian
Graf, Florian
Uray, Martin
Huber, Stefan
Kwitt, Roland
Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
We consider the problem of learning the dynamics in the topology of time-evolving point clouds, the prevalent spatiotemporal model for systems exhibiting collective behavior, such as swarms of insects and birds or particles in physics. In such systems, patterns emerge from (local) interactions among self-propelled entities. While several well-understood governing equations for motion and interaction exist, they are notoriously difficult to fit to data, as most prior work requires knowledge about individual motion trajectories, i.e., a requirement that is challenging to satisfy with an increasing number of entities. To evade such confounding factors, we investigate collective behavior from a $\textit{topological perspective}$, but instead of summarizing entire observation sequences (as done previously), we propose learning a latent dynamical model from topological features $\textit{per time point}$. The latter is then used to formulate a downstream regression task to predict the parametrization of some a priori specified governing equation. We implement this idea based on a latent ODE learned from vectorized (static) persistence diagrams and show that a combination of recent stability results for persistent homology justifies this modeling choice. Various (ablation) experiments not only demonstrate the relevance of each model component but provide compelling empirical evidence that our proposed model - $\textit{Neural Persistence Dynamics}$ - substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art across a diverse set of parameter regression tasks.
title Neural Persistence Dynamics
topic Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15732