Latent Equivariant Operators for Robust Object Recognition: Promises and Challenges

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Hauptverfasser: Dinh, Minh, Deny, Stéphane
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Dinh, Minh
Deny, Stéphane
author_facet Dinh, Minh
Deny, Stéphane
contents Despite the successes of deep learning in computer vision, difficulties persist in recognizing objects that have undergone group-symmetric transformations rarely seen during training$\unicode{x2013}$for example objects seen in unusual poses, scales, positions, or combinations thereof. Equivariant neural networks are a solution to the problem of generalizing across symmetric transformations, but require knowledge of transformations a priori. An alternative family of architectures proposes to learn equivariant operators in a latent space, from examples of symmetric transformations. Here, using simple datasets of rotated and translated noisy MNIST, we illustrate how such architectures can successfully be harnessed for out-of-distribution classification, thus overcoming the limitations of both traditional and equivariant networks. While conceptually enticing, we discuss challenges ahead on the path of scaling these architectures to more complex datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/BRAIN-Aalto/equivariant_operator.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18406
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent Equivariant Operators for Robust Object Recognition: Promises and Challenges
Dinh, Minh
Deny, Stéphane
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Despite the successes of deep learning in computer vision, difficulties persist in recognizing objects that have undergone group-symmetric transformations rarely seen during training$\unicode{x2013}$for example objects seen in unusual poses, scales, positions, or combinations thereof. Equivariant neural networks are a solution to the problem of generalizing across symmetric transformations, but require knowledge of transformations a priori. An alternative family of architectures proposes to learn equivariant operators in a latent space, from examples of symmetric transformations. Here, using simple datasets of rotated and translated noisy MNIST, we illustrate how such architectures can successfully be harnessed for out-of-distribution classification, thus overcoming the limitations of both traditional and equivariant networks. While conceptually enticing, we discuss challenges ahead on the path of scaling these architectures to more complex datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/BRAIN-Aalto/equivariant_operator.
title Latent Equivariant Operators for Robust Object Recognition: Promises and Challenges
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18406