Heat Kernel Goes Topological

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Krahn, Maximilian, Garg, Vikas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Krahn, Maximilian
Garg, Vikas
author_facet Krahn, Maximilian
Garg, Vikas
contents Topological neural networks have emerged as powerful successors of graph neural networks. However, they typically involve higher-order message passing, which incurs significant computational expense. We circumvent this issue with a novel topological framework that introduces a Laplacian operator on combinatorial complexes (CCs), enabling efficient computation of heat kernels that serve as node descriptors. Our approach captures multiscale information and enables permutation-equivariant representations, allowing easy integration into modern transformer-based architectures. Theoretically, the proposed method is maximally expressive because it can distinguish arbitrary non-isomorphic CCs. Empirically, it significantly outperforms existing topological methods in terms of computational efficiency. Besides demonstrating competitive performance with the state-of-the-art descriptors on standard molecular datasets, it exhibits superior capability in distinguishing complex topological structures and avoiding blind spots on topological benchmarks. Overall, this work advances topological deep learning by providing expressive yet scalable representations, thereby opening up exciting avenues for molecular classification and property prediction tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12380
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Heat Kernel Goes Topological
Krahn, Maximilian
Garg, Vikas
Machine Learning
Topological neural networks have emerged as powerful successors of graph neural networks. However, they typically involve higher-order message passing, which incurs significant computational expense. We circumvent this issue with a novel topological framework that introduces a Laplacian operator on combinatorial complexes (CCs), enabling efficient computation of heat kernels that serve as node descriptors. Our approach captures multiscale information and enables permutation-equivariant representations, allowing easy integration into modern transformer-based architectures. Theoretically, the proposed method is maximally expressive because it can distinguish arbitrary non-isomorphic CCs. Empirically, it significantly outperforms existing topological methods in terms of computational efficiency. Besides demonstrating competitive performance with the state-of-the-art descriptors on standard molecular datasets, it exhibits superior capability in distinguishing complex topological structures and avoiding blind spots on topological benchmarks. Overall, this work advances topological deep learning by providing expressive yet scalable representations, thereby opening up exciting avenues for molecular classification and property prediction tasks.
title Heat Kernel Goes Topological
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12380