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Main Authors: Franzen, Daniel, Filling, Jean Philip, Wand, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15368
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author Franzen, Daniel
Filling, Jean Philip
Wand, Michael
author_facet Franzen, Daniel
Filling, Jean Philip
Wand, Michael
contents Group-convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) are among the most important methods for introducing symmetry as an inductive bias in deep learning: In each linear layer, GCNNs sample a transformation group $G$ densely and correlate data and filters in different poses (with suitable anti-aliasing for steerable GCNNs) to maintain equivariance with respect to $G$. Unfortunately, applying filters to many data items resulting from this sampling is expensive (even for translations alone, i.e., in ordinary CNNs), and costs grow exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom (such as translations and rotations in 3D), which often hinders practical applications. In this paper, we propose sampling in feature space, i.e., replacing geometrically dense samples with representative samples selected by feature similarity. This decouples geometric resolution from memory and processing costs during training and inference, providing a novel way to trade off computational effort and accuracy. Our main empirical finding is that a coarse feature-space sampling already preserves classification accuracy remarkably well, which permits precomputation based on geometric similarity, accelerating the training of equivariant 3D classifiers substantially.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_15368
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discretizing Group-Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Geometry in Feature Space
Franzen, Daniel
Filling, Jean Philip
Wand, Michael
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
Group-convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) are among the most important methods for introducing symmetry as an inductive bias in deep learning: In each linear layer, GCNNs sample a transformation group $G$ densely and correlate data and filters in different poses (with suitable anti-aliasing for steerable GCNNs) to maintain equivariance with respect to $G$. Unfortunately, applying filters to many data items resulting from this sampling is expensive (even for translations alone, i.e., in ordinary CNNs), and costs grow exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom (such as translations and rotations in 3D), which often hinders practical applications. In this paper, we propose sampling in feature space, i.e., replacing geometrically dense samples with representative samples selected by feature similarity. This decouples geometric resolution from memory and processing costs during training and inference, providing a novel way to trade off computational effort and accuracy. Our main empirical finding is that a coarse feature-space sampling already preserves classification accuracy remarkably well, which permits precomputation based on geometric similarity, accelerating the training of equivariant 3D classifiers substantially.
title Discretizing Group-Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Geometry in Feature Space
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15368