Recurrent Equivariant Constraint Modulation: Learning Per-Layer Symmetry Relaxation from Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pertigkiozoglou, Stefanos, Petrache, Mircea, Trivedi, Shubhendu, Daniilidis, Kostas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Pertigkiozoglou, Stefanos
Petrache, Mircea
Trivedi, Shubhendu
Daniilidis, Kostas
author_facet Pertigkiozoglou, Stefanos
Petrache, Mircea
Trivedi, Shubhendu
Daniilidis, Kostas
contents Equivariant neural networks exploit underlying task symmetries to improve generalization, but strict equivariance constraints can induce more complex optimization dynamics that can hinder learning. Prior work addresses these limitations by relaxing strict equivariance during training, but typically relies on prespecified, explicit, or implicit target levels of relaxation for each network layer, which are task-dependent and costly to tune. We propose Recurrent Equivariant Constraint Modulation (RECM), a layer-wise constraint modulation mechanism that learns appropriate relaxation levels solely from the training signal and the symmetry properties of each layer's input-target distribution, without requiring any prior knowledge about the task-dependent target relaxation level. We demonstrate that under the proposed RECM update, the relaxation level of each layer provably converges to a value upper-bounded by its symmetry gap, namely the degree to which its input-target distribution deviates from exact symmetry. Consequently, layers processing symmetric distributions recover full equivariance, while those with approximate symmetries retain sufficient flexibility to learn non-symmetric solutions when warranted by the data. Empirically, RECM outperforms prior methods across diverse exact and approximate equivariant tasks, including the challenging molecular conformer generation on the GEOM-Drugs dataset.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recurrent Equivariant Constraint Modulation: Learning Per-Layer Symmetry Relaxation from Data
Pertigkiozoglou, Stefanos
Petrache, Mircea
Trivedi, Shubhendu
Daniilidis, Kostas
Machine Learning
Equivariant neural networks exploit underlying task symmetries to improve generalization, but strict equivariance constraints can induce more complex optimization dynamics that can hinder learning. Prior work addresses these limitations by relaxing strict equivariance during training, but typically relies on prespecified, explicit, or implicit target levels of relaxation for each network layer, which are task-dependent and costly to tune. We propose Recurrent Equivariant Constraint Modulation (RECM), a layer-wise constraint modulation mechanism that learns appropriate relaxation levels solely from the training signal and the symmetry properties of each layer's input-target distribution, without requiring any prior knowledge about the task-dependent target relaxation level. We demonstrate that under the proposed RECM update, the relaxation level of each layer provably converges to a value upper-bounded by its symmetry gap, namely the degree to which its input-target distribution deviates from exact symmetry. Consequently, layers processing symmetric distributions recover full equivariance, while those with approximate symmetries retain sufficient flexibility to learn non-symmetric solutions when warranted by the data. Empirically, RECM outperforms prior methods across diverse exact and approximate equivariant tasks, including the challenging molecular conformer generation on the GEOM-Drugs dataset.
title Recurrent Equivariant Constraint Modulation: Learning Per-Layer Symmetry Relaxation from Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02853