Staying on the Manifold: Geometry-Aware Noise Injection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jacobsen, Albert Kjøller, Gegenfurtner, Johanna Marie, Arvanitidis, Georgios
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jacobsen, Albert Kjøller
Gegenfurtner, Johanna Marie
Arvanitidis, Georgios
author_facet Jacobsen, Albert Kjøller
Gegenfurtner, Johanna Marie
Arvanitidis, Georgios
contents It has been shown that perturbing the input during training implicitly regularises the gradient of the learnt function, leading to smoother models and enhancing generalisation. However, previous research mostly considered the addition of ambient noise in the input space, without considering the underlying structure of the data. In this work, we propose several strategies of adding geometry-aware input noise that accounts for the lower dimensional manifold the input space inhabits. We start by projecting ambient Gaussian noise onto the tangent space of the manifold. In a second step, the noise sample is mapped on the manifold via the associated geodesic curve. We also consider Brownian motion noise, which moves in random steps along the manifold. We show that geometry-aware noise leads to improved generalisation and robustness to hyperparameter selection on highly curved manifolds, while performing at least as well as training without noise on simpler manifolds. Our proposed framework extends to data manifolds approximated by generative models and we observe similar trends on the MNIST digits dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20201
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Staying on the Manifold: Geometry-Aware Noise Injection
Jacobsen, Albert Kjøller
Gegenfurtner, Johanna Marie
Arvanitidis, Georgios
Machine Learning
Differential Geometry
It has been shown that perturbing the input during training implicitly regularises the gradient of the learnt function, leading to smoother models and enhancing generalisation. However, previous research mostly considered the addition of ambient noise in the input space, without considering the underlying structure of the data. In this work, we propose several strategies of adding geometry-aware input noise that accounts for the lower dimensional manifold the input space inhabits. We start by projecting ambient Gaussian noise onto the tangent space of the manifold. In a second step, the noise sample is mapped on the manifold via the associated geodesic curve. We also consider Brownian motion noise, which moves in random steps along the manifold. We show that geometry-aware noise leads to improved generalisation and robustness to hyperparameter selection on highly curved manifolds, while performing at least as well as training without noise on simpler manifolds. Our proposed framework extends to data manifolds approximated by generative models and we observe similar trends on the MNIST digits dataset.
title Staying on the Manifold: Geometry-Aware Noise Injection
topic Machine Learning
Differential Geometry
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20201