Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chen, Yuxuan, Park, Jung Yeon, Eijkelboom, Floor, Yang, Jianke, van de Meent, Jan-Willem, Wong, Lawson L. S., Walters, Robin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908858098647040
author Chen, Yuxuan
Park, Jung Yeon
Eijkelboom, Floor
Yang, Jianke
van de Meent, Jan-Willem
Wong, Lawson L. S.
Walters, Robin
author_facet Chen, Yuxuan
Park, Jung Yeon
Eijkelboom, Floor
Yang, Jianke
van de Meent, Jan-Willem
Wong, Lawson L. S.
Walters, Robin
contents Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds and ModelNet10 show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20043
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching
Chen, Yuxuan
Park, Jung Yeon
Eijkelboom, Floor
Yang, Jianke
van de Meent, Jan-Willem
Wong, Lawson L. S.
Walters, Robin
Artificial Intelligence
Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds and ModelNet10 show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries.
title Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20043