Beyond Rigid Geometries: The Spline-Pullback Metric for Universal Diffeomorphic SPD Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Das, Tushar, Dutta, Subrata, Neogy, Sarmistha, Singh, Koushlendra Kumar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Das, Tushar
Dutta, Subrata
Neogy, Sarmistha
Singh, Koushlendra Kumar
author_facet Das, Tushar
Dutta, Subrata
Neogy, Sarmistha
Singh, Koushlendra Kumar
contents The integration of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices into deep learning has historically relied on fixed algebraic Riemannian metrics. Analogous to hand-crafted features in classical machine learning, these static formulations impose rigid geometries limiting network expressivity and adaptability. Recent attempts to parameterize these geometries often violate the axioms of primary matrix functions through unconstrained powers or rank-dependent scaling, inviting spatial folding, loss of global surjectivity, and gradient collapse at spectral singularities. In this paper, we introduce the Spline-Pullback Metric (SPM), instantiated as Spectral-SPM and Cholesky-SPM, marking a paradigm shift from static metric selection to universal geometric approximation. By parameterizing the global diffeomorphism via a rank-invariant, monotonically constrained B-spline, SPM acts as a dense universal approximator for strictly increasing $C^1$ diffeomorphisms and theoretically subsumes existing pullback metrics while enabling localized non-linear spectral modelling. Topologically, SPM provides a globally bijective pullback geometry precluding rank-swapping discontinuities and gradient instabilities. Empirically, SPM achieves a state-of-the-art performance across 3 datasets utilizing Linear Probes, SPDNets, and deep Riemannian ResNets.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_04406
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Rigid Geometries: The Spline-Pullback Metric for Universal Diffeomorphic SPD Representation Learning
Das, Tushar
Dutta, Subrata
Neogy, Sarmistha
Singh, Koushlendra Kumar
Machine Learning
The integration of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices into deep learning has historically relied on fixed algebraic Riemannian metrics. Analogous to hand-crafted features in classical machine learning, these static formulations impose rigid geometries limiting network expressivity and adaptability. Recent attempts to parameterize these geometries often violate the axioms of primary matrix functions through unconstrained powers or rank-dependent scaling, inviting spatial folding, loss of global surjectivity, and gradient collapse at spectral singularities. In this paper, we introduce the Spline-Pullback Metric (SPM), instantiated as Spectral-SPM and Cholesky-SPM, marking a paradigm shift from static metric selection to universal geometric approximation. By parameterizing the global diffeomorphism via a rank-invariant, monotonically constrained B-spline, SPM acts as a dense universal approximator for strictly increasing $C^1$ diffeomorphisms and theoretically subsumes existing pullback metrics while enabling localized non-linear spectral modelling. Topologically, SPM provides a globally bijective pullback geometry precluding rank-swapping discontinuities and gradient instabilities. Empirically, SPM achieves a state-of-the-art performance across 3 datasets utilizing Linear Probes, SPDNets, and deep Riemannian ResNets.
title Beyond Rigid Geometries: The Spline-Pullback Metric for Universal Diffeomorphic SPD Representation Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04406