Directed Semi-Simplicial Learning with Applications to Brain Activity Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lecha, Manuel, Cavallo, Andrea, Dominici, Francesca, Levi, Ran, Del Bue, Alessio, Isufi, Elvin, Morerio, Pietro, Battiloro, Claudio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Lecha, Manuel
Cavallo, Andrea
Dominici, Francesca
Levi, Ran
Del Bue, Alessio
Isufi, Elvin
Morerio, Pietro
Battiloro, Claudio
author_facet Lecha, Manuel
Cavallo, Andrea
Dominici, Francesca
Levi, Ran
Del Bue, Alessio
Isufi, Elvin
Morerio, Pietro
Battiloro, Claudio
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at learning from pairwise interactions but often overlook multi-way and hierarchical relationships. Topological Deep Learning (TDL) addresses this limitation by leveraging combinatorial topological spaces. However, existing TDL models are restricted to undirected settings and fail to capture the higher-order directed patterns prevalent in many complex systems, e.g., brain networks, where such interactions are both abundant and functionally significant. To fill this gap, we introduce Semi-Simplicial Neural Networks (SSNs), a principled class of TDL models that operate on semi-simplicial sets -- combinatorial structures that encode directed higher-order motifs and their directional relationships. To enhance scalability, we propose Routing-SSNs, which dynamically select the most informative relations in a learnable manner. We prove that SSNs are strictly more expressive than standard graph and TDL models. We then introduce a new principled framework for brain dynamics representation learning, grounded in the ability of SSNs to provably recover topological descriptors shown to successfully characterize brain activity. Empirically, SSNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on brain dynamics classification tasks, outperforming the second-best model by up to 27%, and message passing GNNs by up to 50% in accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of principled topological models for learning from structured brain data, establishing a unique real-world case study for TDL. We also test SSNs on standard node classification and edge regression tasks, showing competitive performance. We will make the code and data publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17939
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Directed Semi-Simplicial Learning with Applications to Brain Activity Decoding
Lecha, Manuel
Cavallo, Andrea
Dominici, Francesca
Levi, Ran
Del Bue, Alessio
Isufi, Elvin
Morerio, Pietro
Battiloro, Claudio
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at learning from pairwise interactions but often overlook multi-way and hierarchical relationships. Topological Deep Learning (TDL) addresses this limitation by leveraging combinatorial topological spaces. However, existing TDL models are restricted to undirected settings and fail to capture the higher-order directed patterns prevalent in many complex systems, e.g., brain networks, where such interactions are both abundant and functionally significant. To fill this gap, we introduce Semi-Simplicial Neural Networks (SSNs), a principled class of TDL models that operate on semi-simplicial sets -- combinatorial structures that encode directed higher-order motifs and their directional relationships. To enhance scalability, we propose Routing-SSNs, which dynamically select the most informative relations in a learnable manner. We prove that SSNs are strictly more expressive than standard graph and TDL models. We then introduce a new principled framework for brain dynamics representation learning, grounded in the ability of SSNs to provably recover topological descriptors shown to successfully characterize brain activity. Empirically, SSNs achieve state-of-the-art performance on brain dynamics classification tasks, outperforming the second-best model by up to 27%, and message passing GNNs by up to 50% in accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of principled topological models for learning from structured brain data, establishing a unique real-world case study for TDL. We also test SSNs on standard node classification and edge regression tasks, showing competitive performance. We will make the code and data publicly available.
title Directed Semi-Simplicial Learning with Applications to Brain Activity Decoding
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17939