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Apr 20

Frame Averaging for Invariant and Equivariant Network Design

Many machine learning tasks involve learning functions that are known to be invariant or equivariant to certain symmetries of the input data. However, it is often challenging to design neural network architectures that respect these symmetries while being expressive and computationally efficient. For example, Euclidean motion invariant/equivariant graph or point cloud neural networks. We introduce Frame Averaging (FA), a general purpose and systematic framework for adapting known (backbone) architectures to become invariant or equivariant to new symmetry types. Our framework builds on the well known group averaging operator that guarantees invariance or equivariance but is intractable. In contrast, we observe that for many important classes of symmetries, this operator can be replaced with an averaging operator over a small subset of the group elements, called a frame. We show that averaging over a frame guarantees exact invariance or equivariance while often being much simpler to compute than averaging over the entire group. Furthermore, we prove that FA-based models have maximal expressive power in a broad setting and in general preserve the expressive power of their backbone architectures. Using frame averaging, we propose a new class of universal Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), universal Euclidean motion invariant point cloud networks, and Euclidean motion invariant Message Passing (MP) GNNs. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of FA on several applications including point cloud normal estimation, beyond 2-WL graph separation, and n-body dynamics prediction, achieving state-of-the-art results in all of these benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2021

General teleparallel geometric theory of defects

We revisit the geometric theory of defects. In the differential-geometric models of defects that have been adopted since the 1950s, dislocations have been associated with torsion, disclinations with the full curvature, and point defects with the first kind trace of non-metricity. The mainstream formulation exhibits several conceptual and technical shortcomings, most notably a hierarchy inconsistency, the non-exictence of a genuine metric formulation, and the potential emergence of Ostrogradsky-type instabilities. These issues have motivated us to develop a new framework, namely a generalized teleparallel geometric theory of defects. In our model, dislocations are identified with the trace of torsion, disclinations with the second kind trace of the non-metricity, and point defects with the first kind trace of the non-metricity. In addition, we retain the scalar part torsion as a free parameter for describing some possible unknown degrees of freedom in the theory of defects. The proposed geometric theory of defects is free from all of the aforementioned drawbacks and is therefore worthy of further investigation. To ensure the coherence and completeness of the discussion, we begin our analysis with elastic deformations, then summarize the existing metric-affine geometric theory of defects, and finally proceed to our original contribution, namely the new theory introduced here. We formulate the entire theory in Eulerian coordinates. Naturally, all results can be reformulated in Lagrangian coordinates as well. All analyses and formulae are expressed in the language of exterior algebra and are carried out in coordinate-independent orthonormal frames.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 1

An RTK-SLAM Dataset for Absolute Accuracy Evaluation in GNSS-Degraded Environments

RTK-SLAM systems integrate simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS positioning, promising both relative consistency and globally referenced coordinates for efficient georeferenced surveying. A critical and underappreciated issue is that the standard evaluation metric, Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE), first fits an optimal rigid-body transformation between the estimated trajectory and reference before computing errors. This so-called SE(3) alignment absorbs global drift and systematic errors, making trajectories appear more accurate than they are in practice, and is unsuitable for evaluating the global accuracy of RTK-SLAM. We present a geodetically referenced dataset and evaluation methodology that expose this gap. A key design principle is that the RTK receiver is used solely as a system input, while ground truth is established independently via a geodetic total station. This separation is absent from all existing datasets, where GNSS typically serves as (part of) the ground truth. The dataset is collected with a handheld RTK-SLAM device, comprising two scenes. We evaluate LiDAR-inertial, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial RTK-SLAM systems alongside standalone RTK, reporting direct global accuracy and SE(3)-aligned relative accuracy to make the gap explicit. Results show that SE(3) alignment can underestimate absolute positioning error by up to 76\%. RTK-SLAM achieves centimeter-level absolute accuracy in open-sky conditions and maintains decimeter-level global accuracy indoors, where standalone RTK degrades to tens of meters. The dataset, calibration files, and evaluation scripts are publicly available at https://rtk-slam-dataset.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 7

SE(3) Diffusion Model-based Point Cloud Registration for Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation

In this paper, we introduce an SE(3) diffusion model-based point cloud registration framework for 6D object pose estimation in real-world scenarios. Our approach formulates the 3D registration task as a denoising diffusion process, which progressively refines the pose of the source point cloud to obtain a precise alignment with the model point cloud. Training our framework involves two operations: An SE(3) diffusion process and an SE(3) reverse process. The SE(3) diffusion process gradually perturbs the optimal rigid transformation of a pair of point clouds by continuously injecting noise (perturbation transformation). By contrast, the SE(3) reverse process focuses on learning a denoising network that refines the noisy transformation step-by-step, bringing it closer to the optimal transformation for accurate pose estimation. Unlike standard diffusion models used in linear Euclidean spaces, our diffusion model operates on the SE(3) manifold. This requires exploiting the linear Lie algebra se(3) associated with SE(3) to constrain the transformation transitions during the diffusion and reverse processes. Additionally, to effectively train our denoising network, we derive a registration-specific variational lower bound as the optimization objective for model learning. Furthermore, we show that our denoising network can be constructed with a surrogate registration model, making our approach applicable to different deep registration networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our diffusion registration framework presents outstanding pose estimation performance on the real-world TUD-L, LINEMOD, and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 26, 2023

Lie Group Decompositions for Equivariant Neural Networks

Invariance and equivariance to geometrical transformations have proven to be very useful inductive biases when training (convolutional) neural network models, especially in the low-data regime. Much work has focused on the case where the symmetry group employed is compact or abelian, or both. Recent work has explored enlarging the class of transformations used to the case of Lie groups, principally through the use of their Lie algebra, as well as the group exponential and logarithm maps. The applicability of such methods to larger transformation groups is limited by the fact that depending on the group of interest G, the exponential map may not be surjective. Further limitations are encountered when G is neither compact nor abelian. Using the structure and geometry of Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces, we present a framework by which it is possible to work with such groups primarily focusing on the Lie groups G = GL^{+}(n, R) and G = SL(n, R), as well as their representation as affine transformations R^{n} rtimes G. Invariant integration as well as a global parametrization is realized by decomposing the `larger` groups into subgroups and submanifolds which can be handled individually. Under this framework, we show how convolution kernels can be parametrized to build models equivariant with respect to affine transformations. We evaluate the robustness and out-of-distribution generalisation capability of our model on the standard affine-invariant benchmark classification task, where we outperform all previous equivariant models as well as all Capsule Network proposals.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

A Third-Order Gaussian Process Trajectory Representation Framework with Closed-Form Kinematics for Continuous-Time Motion Estimation

In this paper, we propose a third-order, i.e., white-noise-on-jerk, Gaussian Process (GP) Trajectory Representation (TR) framework for continuous-time (CT) motion estimation (ME) tasks. Our framework features a unified trajectory representation that encapsulates the kinematic models of both SO(3)timesR^3 and SE(3) pose representations. This encapsulation strategy allows users to use the same implementation of measurement-based factors for either choice of pose representation, which facilitates experimentation and comparison to achieve the best model for the ME task. In addition, unique to our framework, we derive the kinematic models with the closed-form temporal derivatives of the local variable of SO(3) and SE(3), which so far has only been approximated based on the Taylor expansion in the literature. Our experiments show that these kinematic models can improve the estimation accuracy in high-speed scenarios. All analytical Jacobians of the interpolated states with respect to the support states of the trajectory representation, as well as the motion prior factors, are also provided for accelerated Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the framework in various motion estimation tasks such as localization, calibration, and odometry, facilitating fast prototyping for ME researchers. We release the source code for the benefit of the community. Our project is available at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/gptr.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Approximately Piecewise E(3) Equivariant Point Networks

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are E(3) equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are E(3) equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local E(3) symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-E(3) equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise E(3) symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 13, 2024

EquiformerV3: Scaling Efficient, Expressive, and General SE(3)-Equivariant Graph Attention Transformers

As SE(3)-equivariant graph neural networks mature as a core tool for 3D atomistic modeling, improving their efficiency, expressivity, and physical consistency has become a central challenge for large-scale applications. In this work, we introduce EquiformerV3, the third generation of the SE(3)-equivariant graph attention Transformer, designed to advance all three dimensions: efficiency, expressivity, and generality. Building on EquiformerV2, we have the following three key advances. First, we optimize the software implementation, achieving 1.75times speedup. Second, we introduce simple and effective modifications to EquiformerV2, including equivariant merged layer normalization, improved feedforward network hyper-parameters, and attention with smooth radius cutoff. Third, we propose SwiGLU-S^2 activations to incorporate many-body interactions for better theoretical expressivity and to preserve strict equivariance while reducing the complexity of sampling S^2 grids. Together, SwiGLU-S^2 activations and smooth-cutoff attention enable accurate modeling of smoothly varying potential energy surfaces (PES), generalizing EquiformerV3 to tasks requiring energy-conserving simulations and higher-order derivatives of PES. With these improvements, EquiformerV3 trained with the auxiliary task of denoising non-equilibrium structures (DeNS) achieves state-of-the-art results on OC20, OMat24, and Matbench Discovery.

Symmetries and Asymptotically Flat Space

The construction of a theory of quantum gravity is an outstanding problem that can benefit from better understanding the laws of nature that are expected to hold in regimes currently inaccessible to experiment. Such fundamental laws can be found by considering the classical counterparts of a quantum theory. For example, conservation laws in a quantum theory often stem from conservation laws of the corresponding classical theory. In order to construct such laws, this thesis is concerned with the interplay between symmetries and conservation laws of classical field theories and their application to asymptotically flat spacetimes. This work begins with an explanation of symmetries in field theories with a focus on variational symmetries and their associated conservation laws. Boundary conditions for general relativity are then formulated on three-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes at null infinity using the method of conformal completion. Conserved quantities related to asymptotic symmetry transformations are derived and their properties are studied. This is done in a manifestly coordinate independent manner. In a separate step a coordinate system is introduced, such that the results can be compared to existing literature. Next, asymptotically flat spacetimes which contain both future as well as past null infinity are considered. Asymptotic symmetries occurring at these disjoint regions of three-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes are linked and the corresponding conserved quantities are matched. Finally, it is shown how asymptotic symmetries lead to the notion of distinct Minkowski spaces that can be differentiated by conserved quantities.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 16, 2020

Equivariant Single View Pose Prediction Via Induced and Restricted Representations

Learning about the three-dimensional world from two-dimensional images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. An ideal neural network architecture for such tasks would leverage the fact that objects can be rotated and translated in three dimensions to make predictions about novel images. However, imposing SO(3)-equivariance on two-dimensional inputs is difficult because the group of three-dimensional rotations does not have a natural action on the two-dimensional plane. Specifically, it is possible that an element of SO(3) will rotate an image out of plane. We show that an algorithm that learns a three-dimensional representation of the world from two dimensional images must satisfy certain geometric consistency properties which we formulate as SO(2)-equivariance constraints. We use the induced and restricted representations of SO(2) on SO(3) to construct and classify architectures which satisfy these geometric consistency constraints. We prove that any architecture which respects said consistency constraints can be realized as an instance of our construction. We show that three previously proposed neural architectures for 3D pose prediction are special cases of our construction. We propose a new algorithm that is a learnable generalization of previously considered methods. We test our architecture on three pose predictions task and achieve SOTA results on both the PASCAL3D+ and SYMSOL pose estimation tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 7, 2023

On the Higgs spectra of the 3-3-1 model with the sextet of scalars engendering the type II seesaw mechanism

In the 3-3-1 model with right-handed neutrinos, three triplets of scalars engender the correct sequence of symmetry breaking, SU(3)_C times SU(3)_L times U(1)_X rightarrow SU(3)_C times SU(2)_L times U(1)_Y rightarrow SU(3)_C times U(1)_{EM}, generating mass for all fermions, except neutrinos. Tiny neutrino masses may be achieved by adding one sextet of scalars to the original scalar content. As consequence, it emerges a very complex scalar sector, involving terms that violate lepton number explicitly, too. The main obstacle to the development of the phenomenology of such scenario is the knowledge of its spectrum of scalars since, now, there are 15 massive scalar particles on it. The proposal of this work is to do an exhaustive analysis of such scalar sector with lepton number being explicitly violated at low, electroweak and high energy scales by means of trilinear terms in the potential. The first case can be addressed analytically and, as a nice result, we have observed that the scalar content of such case is split into two categories: One belonging to the 331 energy scale and the other belonging to the EWSB energy scale, with the last recovering the well known THDM+triplet. For the other cases, the scalar sector can be addressed only numerically. Hence, we proposed a very general approach for the numerical study of the potential, avoiding simplifications that can make us reach conclusions without foundation. We show that, in the case of lepton number being explicitly violated at electroweak scale, it is possible to recover the same physics of the THDM+triplet, as the previous case. Among all the possibilities, we call the attention to one special case which generates the 3HDM+triplet scenario. For the last case, when lepton number is violated at high energy scale, the sextet become very massive and decouples from the original scalar content of the 3-3-1 model.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 20, 2022

Enabling Efficient Equivariant Operations in the Fourier Basis via Gaunt Tensor Products

Developing equivariant neural networks for the E(3) group plays an important role in modeling 3D data across real-world applications. Enforcing this equivariance primarily involves the tensor products of irreducible representations (irreps). However, the computational complexity of such operations increases significantly as higher-order tensors are used. In this work, we propose a systematic approach to substantially accelerate the computation of the tensor products of irreps. We mathematically connect the commonly used Clebsch-Gordan coefficients to the Gaunt coefficients, which are integrals of products of three spherical harmonics. Through Gaunt coefficients, the tensor product of irreps becomes equivalent to the multiplication between spherical functions represented by spherical harmonics. This perspective further allows us to change the basis for the equivariant operations from spherical harmonics to a 2D Fourier basis. Consequently, the multiplication between spherical functions represented by a 2D Fourier basis can be efficiently computed via the convolution theorem and Fast Fourier Transforms. This transformation reduces the complexity of full tensor products of irreps from O(L^6) to O(L^3), where L is the max degree of irreps. Leveraging this approach, we introduce the Gaunt Tensor Product, which serves as a new method to construct efficient equivariant operations across different model architectures. Our experiments on the Open Catalyst Project and 3BPA datasets demonstrate both the increased efficiency and improved performance of our approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

Parameter estimation from the core-bounce phase of rotating core collapse supernovae in real interferometer noise

In this work we propose an analytical model that reproduces the core-bounds phase of gravitational waves (GW) of Rapidly Rotating (RR) from Core Collapse Supernovae (CCSNe), as a function of three parameters, the arrival time tau, the ratio of the kinetic and potential energy beta and a phenomenological parameter alpha related to rotation and equation of state (EOS). To validate the model we use 126 waveforms from the Richers catalog Richers_2017 selected with the criteria of exploring a range of rotation profiles, and involving EOS. To quantify the degree of accuracy of the proposed model, with a particular focus on the rotation parameter beta, we show that the average Fitting Factor (FF) between the simulated waveforms with the templates is 94.4\%. In order to estimate the parameters we propose a frequentist matched filtering approach in real interferometric noise which does not require assigning any priors. We use the Matched Filter (MF) technique, where we inject a bank of templates considering simulated colored Gaussian noise and the real noise of O3L1. For example for A300w6.00\_BHBLP at 10Kpc we obtain a standar deviation of sigma = 3.34times 10^{-3} for simulated colored Gaussian noise and sigma= 1.46times 10^{-2} for real noise. On the other hand, from the asymptotic expansion of the variance we obtain the theoretical minimum error for beta at 10 kpc and optimal orientation. The estimation error in this case is from 10^{-2} to 10^{-3} as beta increases. We show that the results of the estimation error of beta for the 3-parameter space (3D) is consistent with the single-parameter space (1D), which allows us to conclude that beta is decoupled from the others two parameters.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023

LU-NeRF: Scene and Pose Estimation by Synchronizing Local Unposed NeRFs

A critical obstacle preventing NeRF models from being deployed broadly in the wild is their reliance on accurate camera poses. Consequently, there is growing interest in extending NeRF models to jointly optimize camera poses and scene representation, which offers an alternative to off-the-shelf SfM pipelines which have well-understood failure modes. Existing approaches for unposed NeRF operate under limited assumptions, such as a prior pose distribution or coarse pose initialization, making them less effective in a general setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach, LU-NeRF, that jointly estimates camera poses and neural radiance fields with relaxed assumptions on pose configuration. Our approach operates in a local-to-global manner, where we first optimize over local subsets of the data, dubbed mini-scenes. LU-NeRF estimates local pose and geometry for this challenging few-shot task. The mini-scene poses are brought into a global reference frame through a robust pose synchronization step, where a final global optimization of pose and scene can be performed. We show our LU-NeRF pipeline outperforms prior attempts at unposed NeRF without making restrictive assumptions on the pose prior. This allows us to operate in the general SE(3) pose setting, unlike the baselines. Our results also indicate our model can be complementary to feature-based SfM pipelines as it compares favorably to COLMAP on low-texture and low-resolution images.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 8, 2023

EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning

Learning to predict agent motions with relationship reasoning is important for many applications. In motion prediction tasks, maintaining motion equivariance under Euclidean geometric transformations and invariance of agent interaction is a critical and fundamental principle. However, such equivariance and invariance properties are overlooked by most existing methods. To fill this gap, we propose EqMotion, an efficient equivariant motion prediction model with invariant interaction reasoning. To achieve motion equivariance, we propose an equivariant geometric feature learning module to learn a Euclidean transformable feature through dedicated designs of equivariant operations. To reason agent's interactions, we propose an invariant interaction reasoning module to achieve a more stable interaction modeling. To further promote more comprehensive motion features, we propose an invariant pattern feature learning module to learn an invariant pattern feature, which cooperates with the equivariant geometric feature to enhance network expressiveness. We conduct experiments for the proposed model on four distinct scenarios: particle dynamics, molecule dynamics, human skeleton motion prediction and pedestrian trajectory prediction. Experimental results show that our method is not only generally applicable, but also achieves state-of-the-art prediction performances on all the four tasks, improving by 24.0/30.1/8.6/9.2%. Code is available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/EqMotion.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2023

Objects in Generated Videos Are Slower Than They Appear: Models Suffer Sub-Earth Gravity and Don't Know Galileo's Principle...for now

Video generators are increasingly evaluated as potential world models, which requires them to encode and understand physical laws. We investigate their representation of a fundamental law: gravity. Out-of-the-box video generators consistently generate objects falling at an effectively slower acceleration. However, these physical tests are often confounded by ambiguous metric scale. We first investigate if observed physical errors are artifacts of these ambiguities (e.g., incorrect frame rate assumptions). We find that even temporal rescaling cannot correct the high-variance gravity artifacts. To rigorously isolate the underlying physical representation from these confounds, we introduce a unit-free, two-object protocol that tests the timing ratio t_1^2/t_2^2 = h_1/h_2, a relationship independent of g, focal length, and scale. This relative test reveals violations of Galileo's equivalence principle. We then demonstrate that this physical gap can be partially mitigated with targeted specialization. A lightweight low-rank adaptor fine-tuned on only 100 single-ball clips raises g_{eff} from 1.81,m/s^2 to 6.43,m/s^2 (reaching 65% of terrestrial gravity). This specialist adaptor also generalizes zero-shot to two-ball drops and inclined planes, offering initial evidence that specific physical laws can be corrected with minimal data.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Generalizing Neural Human Fitting to Unseen Poses With Articulated SE(3) Equivariance

We address the problem of fitting a parametric human body model (SMPL) to point cloud data. Optimization-based methods require careful initialization and are prone to becoming trapped in local optima. Learning-based methods address this but do not generalize well when the input pose is far from those seen during training. For rigid point clouds, remarkable generalization has been achieved by leveraging SE(3)-equivariant networks, but these methods do not work on articulated objects. In this work we extend this idea to human bodies and propose ArtEq, a novel part-based SE(3)-equivariant neural architecture for SMPL model estimation from point clouds. Specifically, we learn a part detection network by leveraging local SO(3) invariance, and regress shape and pose using articulated SE(3) shape-invariant and pose-equivariant networks, all trained end-to-end. Our novel pose regression module leverages the permutation-equivariant property of self-attention layers to preserve rotational equivariance. Experimental results show that ArtEq generalizes to poses not seen during training, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by ~44% in terms of body reconstruction accuracy, without requiring an optimization refinement step. Furthermore, ArtEq is three orders of magnitude faster during inference than prior work and has 97.3% fewer parameters. The code and model are available for research purposes at https://arteq.is.tue.mpg.de.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

Fast, Expressive SE(n) Equivariant Networks through Weight-Sharing in Position-Orientation Space

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

Characterising gravitational wave stochastic background anisotropy with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Detecting a stochastic gravitational wave background, particularly radiation from individually unresolvable super-massive black hole binary systems, is one of the primary targets for Pulsar Timing Arrays. Increasingly more stringent upper limits are being set on these signals under the assumption that the background radiation is isotropic. However, some level of anisotropy may be present and the characterisation of the power at different angular scales carries important information. We show that the standard analysis for isotropic backgrounds can be generalised in a conceptually straightforward way to the case of generic anisotropic background radiation by decomposing the angular distribution of the gravitational wave power on the sky into multipole moments. We introduce the concept of generalised overlap reduction functions which characterise the effect of the anisotropy multipoles on the correlation of the timing residuals from the pulsars timed by a Pulsar Timing Array. In a search for a signal characterised by a generic anisotropy, the generalised overlap reduction functions play the role of the so-called Hellings and Downs curve used for isotropic radiation. We compute the generalised overlap reduction functions for a generic level of anisotropy and Pulsar Timing Array configuration. We also provide an order of magnitude estimate of the level of anisotropy that can be expected in the background generated by super-massive black hole binary systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 23, 2013

Regularizing Towards Soft Equivariance Under Mixed Symmetries

Datasets often have their intrinsic symmetries, and particular deep-learning models called equivariant or invariant models have been developed to exploit these symmetries. However, if some or all of these symmetries are only approximate, which frequently happens in practice, these models may be suboptimal due to the architectural restrictions imposed on them. We tackle this issue of approximate symmetries in a setup where symmetries are mixed, i.e., they are symmetries of not single but multiple different types and the degree of approximation varies across these types. Instead of proposing a new architectural restriction as in most of the previous approaches, we present a regularizer-based method for building a model for a dataset with mixed approximate symmetries. The key component of our method is what we call equivariance regularizer for a given type of symmetries, which measures how much a model is equivariant with respect to the symmetries of the type. Our method is trained with these regularizers, one per each symmetry type, and the strength of the regularizers is automatically tuned during training, leading to the discovery of the approximation levels of some candidate symmetry types without explicit supervision. Using synthetic function approximation and motion forecasting tasks, we demonstrate that our method achieves better accuracy than prior approaches while discovering the approximate symmetry levels correctly.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1, 2023

A mechanism to generate varying speed of light via Higgs-dilaton coupling: Theory and cosmological applications

We allow the Higgs field Phi to interact with a dilaton field chi of the background spacetime via the coupling chi^2,Phi^daggerPhi. Upon spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, the Higgs VEV becomes proportional to chi. While traditionally this linkage is employed to make the Planck mass and particle masses dependent on chi, we present an textit alternative mechanism: the Higgs VEV will be used to construct Planck's constant hbar and speed of light c. Specifically, each open set vicinity of a given point x^* on the spacetime manifold is equipped with a replica of the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam action operating with its own effective values of hbar_* and c_* per hbar_*proptochi^{-1/2}(x^*) and c_*proptochi^{1/2}(x^*), causing these ``fundamental constants'' to vary alongside the dynamical field chi. Moreover, in each open set around x^*, the prevailing value chi(x^*) determines the length and time scales for physical processes occurring in this region as lproptochi^{-1}(x^*) and tauproptochi^{-3/2}(x^*). This leads to an textit anisotropic relation tau^{-1}propto l^{-3/2} between the rate of clocks and the length of rods, resulting in a distinct set of novel physical phenomena. For late-time cosmology, the variation of c along the trajectory of light waves from distant supernovae towards the Earth-based observer necessitates modifications to the Lema\^itre redshift relation and the Hubble law. These modifications are capable of: (1) Accounting for the Pantheon Catalog of SNeIa through a declining speed of light in an expanding Einstein--de Sitter universe, thus avoiding the need for dark energy; (2) Revitalizing Blanchard-Douspis-Rowan-Robinson-Sarkar's CMB power spectrum analysis that bypassed dark energy [A&A 412, 35 (2003)]; and (3) Resolving the H_0 tension without requiring a dynamical dark energy component.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 5, 2024

PaRot: Patch-Wise Rotation-Invariant Network via Feature Disentanglement and Pose Restoration

Recent interest in point cloud analysis has led rapid progress in designing deep learning methods for 3D models. However, state-of-the-art models are not robust to rotations, which remains an unknown prior to real applications and harms the model performance. In this work, we introduce a novel Patch-wise Rotation-invariant network (PaRot), which achieves rotation invariance via feature disentanglement and produces consistent predictions for samples with arbitrary rotations. Specifically, we design a siamese training module which disentangles rotation invariance and equivariance from patches defined over different scales, e.g., the local geometry and global shape, via a pair of rotations. However, our disentangled invariant feature loses the intrinsic pose information of each patch. To solve this problem, we propose a rotation-invariant geometric relation to restore the relative pose with equivariant information for patches defined over different scales. Utilising the pose information, we propose a hierarchical module which implements intra-scale and inter-scale feature aggregation for 3D shape learning. Moreover, we introduce a pose-aware feature propagation process with the rotation-invariant relative pose information embedded. Experiments show that our disentanglement module extracts high-quality rotation-robust features and the proposed lightweight model achieves competitive results in rotated 3D object classification and part segmentation tasks. Our project page is released at: https://patchrot.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 5, 2023

A Geometric Theory of Cosmological Structure via Entropic Curvature in Wasserstein Space

We construct a geometric framework for cosmological large-scale structure based on optimal transport theory and Wasserstein geometry. In this framework, Ricci curvature on the probability measure space P_2(M) is characterized by the geodesic convexity of entropy and is formulated as the response of probability distributions to optimal transport. We introduce effective Ricci curvatures K_{eff}^{(infty)} and K_{eff}^{(N)} associated with Kullback--Leibler-type and Rényi-type entropies, corresponding respectively to the curvature-dimension conditions CD(K,infty) and CD(K,N). By localizing these curvatures to finite scales using local and reference measures, we construct curvature indicators applicable to observational data. Under a local quadratic approximation, the effective curvature reduces to the Hessian of the log-density, showing that conventional Hessian-based structure classifications arise as a limiting case of the present framework. We further show that effective curvature depends on observational scale and formulate this dependence as a scale flow, distinct from Ricci flow because it describes a change of resolution rather than a time evolution of geometry. Treating curvature as a random field then extends the statistical description of density fields: curvature statistics are given by higher-order weighted integrals of the power spectrum and by spatial derivatives of the correlation function, emphasizing geometric rather than amplitude information. This framework provides a unified connection between optimal transport geometry and cosmological structure analysis, and offers a new perspective on multiscale structure and nonlinear statistics.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 31

Astrometric Effects of a Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background

A stochastic gravitational wave background causes the apparent positions of distant sources to fluctuate, with angular deflections of order the characteristic strain amplitude of the gravitational waves. These fluctuations may be detectable with high precision astrometry, as first suggested by Braginsky et al. in 1990. Several researchers have made order of magnitude estimates of the upper limits obtainable on the gravitational wave spectrum \Omega_gw(f), at frequencies of order f ~ 1 yr^-1, both for the future space-based optical interferometry missions GAIA and SIM, and for VLBI interferometry in radio wavelengths with the SKA. For GAIA, tracking N ~ 10^6 quasars over a time of T ~ 1 yr with an angular accuracy of \Delta \theta ~ 10 \mu as would yield a sensitivity level of \Omega_gw ~ (\Delta \theta)^2/(N T^2 H_0^2) ~ 10^-6, which would be comparable with pulsar timing. In this paper we take a first step toward firming up these estimates by computing in detail the statistical properties of the angular deflections caused by a stochastic background. We compute analytically the two point correlation function of the deflections on the sphere, and the spectrum as a function of frequency and angular scale. The fluctuations are concentrated at low frequencies (for a scale invariant stochastic background), and at large angular scales, starting with the quadrupole. The magnetic-type and electric-type pieces of the fluctuations have equal amounts of power.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 21, 2010

Temporal Variations in Pulsar Spectro-Polarimetry: Findings from millisecond pulsar J2144-5237 using Parkes UWL receiver

While the temporal variations of the spectro-polarimetric nature of pulsars remains unexplored, this investigation offers significant potential for uncovering key insights into pulsar emission mechanisms, magnetic field geometry, and propagation effects within the magnetosphere. We developed a package for investigating time-varying spectral behavior for full Stokes parameters and demonstrate it on a millisecond pulsar (MSP) J2144-5237 in a binary system (orbital period ~10 days) using the Parkes UWL receiver. In this study we report rotation measure (RM) variation with orbital phase. We find that the temporal variations in the spectra of Stokes I, Q, and V are generally correlated throughout the orbit, while Stokes U exhibits intervals of both correlation and anticorrelation with Stokes I, depending on the orbital phase. We also provide a Poincare sphere representation of the polarization properties of J2144-5237, demonstrating a systematic temporal change of Poincare sphere location for the main component with orbital phase. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation of time-varying properties of the spectro-polarimetric nature of any pulsars or MSPs. Extending this study to probe the spectro-temporal nature of full Stokes data on a larger sample of MSPs or pulsars has the potential to provide vital information on emission mechanisms inside the magnetosphere, interstellar propagation effects, and binary interactions.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 8

Mapping gravitational-wave backgrounds in modified theories of gravity using pulsar timing arrays

We extend our previous work on applying CMB techniques to the mapping of gravitational-wave backgrounds to backgrounds which have non-GR polarisations. Our analysis and results are presented in the context of pulsar-timing array observations, but the overarching methods are general, and can be easily applied to LIGO or eLISA observations using appropriately modified response functions. Analytic expressions for the pulsar-timing response to gravitational waves with non-GR polarisation are given for each mode of a spin-weighted spherical-harmonic decomposition of the background, which permit the signal to be mapped across the sky to any desired resolution. We also derive the pulsar-timing overlap reduction functions for the various non-GR polarisations, finding analytic forms for anisotropic backgrounds with scalar-transverse ("breathing") and vector-longitudinal polarisations, and a semi-analytic form for scalar-longitudinal backgrounds. Our results indicate that pulsar-timing observations will be completely insensitive to scalar-transverse mode anisotropies in the polarisation amplitude beyond dipole, and anisotropies in the power beyond quadrupole. Analogously to our previous findings that pulsar-timing observations lack sensitivity to tensor-curl modes for a transverse-traceless tensor background, we also find insensitivity to vector-curl modes for a vector-longitudinal background.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 29, 2015

Three-Phase Transformer

We present Three-Phase Transformer (3PT), a residual-stream structural prior for decoder-only Transformers on a standard SwiGLU + RMSNorm + RoPE + GQA backbone. The hidden vector is partitioned into N equally-sized cyclic channels, each maintained by phase-respecting ops: a per-channel RMSNorm, a 2D Givens rotation between attention and FFN that rotates each channel by theta + i*(2*pi/N), and a head-count constraint aligning GQA heads with the partition. The architecture is a self-stabilizing equilibrium between scrambling and re-imposition, not a bolted-on module. The partition carves out a one-dimensional DC subspace orthogonal to the channels, into which we inject a fixed Gabriel's horn profile r(p) = 1/(p+1) as an absolute-position side-channel composing orthogonally with RoPE's relative-position rotation. The canonical N=3 borrows its metaphor from balanced three-phase AC, where three sinusoids 120 degrees apart sum to zero with no anti-correlated pair. At 123M parameters on WikiText-103, 3PT achieves -7.20% perplexity (-2.62% bits-per-byte) over a matched RoPE-Only baseline at +1,536 parameters (0.00124% of total), with 1.93x step-count convergence speedup (1.64x wall-clock). N behaves as a parameter-sharing knob rather than a unique optimum: at 5.5M an N-sweep over {1,2,3,4,6,8,12} is near-monotone with N=1 winning; at 123M a three-seed sweep finds N=3 and N=1 statistically indistinguishable. The load-bearing mechanism is the channel-partitioned residual stream, per-block rotation, per-phase normalization, and horn DC injection. We characterize (a) self-stabilization of the geometry without explicit enforcement, a novel instance of the conservation-law framework for neural networks; (b) a U-shaped depth profile of rotation-angle drift at 12 layers; (c) orthogonal composition with RoPE, attention, and FFN.

BrainsBuild BrainsBuild
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Apr 14 5

How to Train Your HiPPO: State Space Models with Generalized Orthogonal Basis Projections

Linear time-invariant state space models (SSM) are a classical model from engineering and statistics, that have recently been shown to be very promising in machine learning through the Structured State Space sequence model (S4). A core component of S4 involves initializing the SSM state matrix to a particular matrix called a HiPPO matrix, which was empirically important for S4's ability to handle long sequences. However, the specific matrix that S4 uses was actually derived in previous work for a particular time-varying dynamical system, and the use of this matrix as a time-invariant SSM had no known mathematical interpretation. Consequently, the theoretical mechanism by which S4 models long-range dependencies actually remains unexplained. We derive a more general and intuitive formulation of the HiPPO framework, which provides a simple mathematical interpretation of S4 as a decomposition onto exponentially-warped Legendre polynomials, explaining its ability to capture long dependencies. Our generalization introduces a theoretically rich class of SSMs that also lets us derive more intuitive S4 variants for other bases such as the Fourier basis, and explains other aspects of training S4, such as how to initialize the important timescale parameter. These insights improve S4's performance to 86% on the Long Range Arena benchmark, with 96% on the most difficult Path-X task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 23, 2022

Solar System Experiments in the Search for Dark Energy and Dark Matter

We reassess the realistic discovery reach of Solar-System experiments for dark energy (DE) and dark matter (DM), making explicit the bridge from cosmology-level linear responses to local, screened residuals. In scalar-tensor frameworks with a universal conformal coupling A(phi) and chameleon/Vainshtein screening, we map cosmological responses {mu(z,k),Sigma(z,k)} inferred by DESI and Euclid to thin-shell or Vainshtein residuals in deep Solar potentials Phi_N. We emphasize a two-branch strategy. In a detection-first branch, a verified local anomaly -- an Einstein equivalence principle (EEP) violation, a Shapiro-delay signal with |gamma-1|simfewtimes 10^{-6}, an AU-scale Yukawa tail, or a ultralight DM (ULDM) line in clocks/atom interferometers in space (AIS) -- triggers a joint refit of cosmology and Solar-System data under a common microphysical parameterization {V(phi),A(phi)}. In a guardrail branch, Solar-System tests enforce constraints (EEP; PPN parameters gamma,beta; and dot G/G) and close unscreened or weakly screened corners indicated by cosmology. We forecast, per conjunction, |gamma-1|lesssim (2-5)times 10^{-6} (Ka-/X-band or optical Shapiro), eta_{EEP}sim (1--10)times 10^{-17} (drag-free AIS), |dot G/G|sim(3-5)times10^{-15},yr^{-1} (sub-mm-class LLR), a uniform ~2x tightening of AU-scale Yukawa/DM-density bounds, and (3-10)times improved ULDM-coupling reach from clocks. For a conformal benchmark, mu_{ lin,0}=0.10 implies chisimeq mu_{lin,0/2} and a Sun thin shell Delta R/Rlesssim (1/3chi)|gamma-1|/2=2.4times 10^{-3} at |gamma-1|=5times 10^{-6}; Vainshtein screening at 1 AU yields |gamma-1|lesssim 10^{-11}, naturally below near-term reach. We recommend a cost-effective guardrail+discovery portfolio with explicit triggers for escalation to dedicated missions.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 6, 2025

A noncommutative Bianchi I model with radiation

In the present work, we study the dynamical evolution of an homogeneous and anisotropic, noncommutative (NC) Bianchi I (BI) model coupled to a radiation perfect fluid. Our first motivation is determining if the present model tends to an homogeneous and isotropic NC Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) model, during its evolution. In order to simplify our task, we use the Misner parametrization of the BI metric. In terms of that parametrization the BI metric has three metric functions: the scale factor a(t) and the two parameters beta_pm (t), which measure the spatial anisotropy of the model. Our second motivation is trying to describe the present accelerated expansion of the universe using noncommutativity (NCTY). The NCTY is introduced by two nontrivial Poisson brackets between some geometrical as well as matter variables of the model. We recover the description in terms of commutative variables by introducing some variables transformations that depend on the NC parameter. Using those variables transformations, we rewrite the total NC Hamiltonian of the model in terms of commutative variables. From the resulting Hamiltonian, we obtain the dynamical equations for a generic perfect fluid. In order to solve these equations, we restrict our attention to a model where the perfect fluid is radiation. We solve, numerically, these equations and compare the NC solutions to the corresponding commutative ones. The comparison shows that the NC model may be considered as a possible candidate for describing the accelerated expansion of the universe. Finally, we obtain estimates for the NC parameter and compare the main results of the NC BI model coupled to radiation with the same NC BI model coupled to other perfect fluids. As our main result, we show that the solutions, after some time, produce an isotropic universe.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 5, 2024

Flow Equivariant World Models: Memory for Partially Observed Dynamic Environments

Embodied systems experience the world as 'a symphony of flows': a combination of many continuous streams of sensory input coupled to self-motion, interwoven with the dynamics of external objects. These streams obey smooth, time-parameterized symmetries, which combine through a precisely structured algebra; yet most neural network world models ignore this structure and instead repeatedly re-learn the same transformations from data. In this work, we introduce 'Flow Equivariant World Models', a framework in which both self-motion and external object motion are unified as one-parameter Lie group 'flows'. We leverage this unification to implement group equivariance with respect to these transformations, thereby providing a stable latent world representation over hundreds of timesteps. On both 2D and 3D partially observed video world modeling benchmarks, we demonstrate that Flow Equivariant World Models significantly outperform comparable state-of-the-art diffusion-based and memory-augmented world modeling architectures -- particularly when there are predictable world dynamics outside the agent's current field of view. We show that flow equivariance is particularly beneficial for long rollouts, generalizing far beyond the training horizon. By structuring world model representations with respect to internal and external motion, flow equivariance charts a scalable route to data efficient, symmetry-guided, embodied intelligence. Project link: https://flowequivariantworldmodels.github.io.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 3 2

BEVPlace++: Fast, Robust, and Lightweight LiDAR Global Localization for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

This article introduces BEVPlace++, a novel, fast, and robust LiDAR global localization method for unmanned ground vehicles. It uses lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on Bird's Eye View (BEV) image-like representations of LiDAR data to achieve accurate global localization through place recognition, followed by 3-DoF pose estimation. Our detailed analyses reveal an interesting fact that CNNs are inherently effective at extracting distinctive features from LiDAR BEV images. Remarkably, keypoints of two BEV images with large translations can be effectively matched using CNN-extracted features. Building on this insight, we design a Rotation Equivariant Module (REM) to obtain distinctive features while enhancing robustness to rotational changes. A Rotation Equivariant and Invariant Network (REIN) is then developed by cascading REM and a descriptor generator, NetVLAD, to sequentially generate rotation equivariant local features and rotation invariant global descriptors. The global descriptors are used first to achieve robust place recognition, and then local features are used for accurate pose estimation. Experimental results on seven public datasets and our UGV platform demonstrate that BEVPlace++, even when trained on a small dataset (3000 frames of KITTI) only with place labels, generalizes well to unseen environments, performs consistently across different days and years, and adapts to various types of LiDAR scanners. BEVPlace++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple tasks, including place recognition, loop closure detection, and global localization. Additionally, BEVPlace++ is lightweight, runs in real-time, and does not require accurate pose supervision, making it highly convenient for deployment. \revise{The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace2.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 3, 2024

EquiCaps: Predictor-Free Pose-Aware Pre-Trained Capsule Networks

Learning self-supervised representations that are invariant and equivariant to transformations is crucial for advancing beyond traditional visual classification tasks. However, many methods rely on predictor architectures to encode equivariance, despite evidence that architectural choices, such as capsule networks, inherently excel at learning interpretable pose-aware representations. To explore this, we introduce EquiCaps (Equivariant Capsule Network), a capsule-based approach to pose-aware self-supervision that eliminates the need for a specialised predictor for enforcing equivariance. Instead, we leverage the intrinsic pose-awareness capabilities of capsules to improve performance in pose estimation tasks. To further challenge our assumptions, we increase task complexity via multi-geometric transformations to enable a more thorough evaluation of invariance and equivariance by introducing 3DIEBench-T, an extension of a 3D object-rendering benchmark dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that EquiCaps outperforms prior state-of-the-art equivariant methods on rotation prediction, achieving a supervised-level R^2 of 0.78 on the 3DIEBench rotation prediction benchmark and improving upon SIE and CapsIE by 0.05 and 0.04 R^2, respectively. Moreover, in contrast to non-capsule-based equivariant approaches, EquiCaps maintains robust equivariant performance under combined geometric transformations, underscoring its generalisation capabilities and the promise of predictor-free capsule architectures.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

The Price of Freedom: Exploring Expressivity and Runtime Tradeoffs in Equivariant Tensor Products

E(3)-equivariant neural networks have demonstrated success across a wide range of 3D modelling tasks. A fundamental operation in these networks is the tensor product, which interacts two geometric features in an equivariant manner to create new features. Due to the high computational complexity of the tensor product, significant effort has been invested to optimize the runtime of this operation. For example, Luo et al. (2024) recently proposed the Gaunt tensor product (GTP) which promises a significant speedup. In this work, we provide a careful, systematic analysis of a number of tensor product operations. In particular, we emphasize that different tensor products are not performing the same operation. The reported speedups typically come at the cost of expressivity. We introduce measures of expressivity and interactability to characterize these differences. In addition, we realized the original implementation of GTP can be greatly simplified by directly using a spherical grid at no cost in asymptotic runtime. This spherical grid approach is faster on our benchmarks and in actual training of the MACE interatomic potential by 30%. Finally, we provide the first systematic microbenchmarks of the various tensor product operations. We find that the theoretical runtime guarantees can differ wildly from empirical performance, demonstrating the need for careful application-specific benchmarking. Code is available at https://github.com/atomicarchitects/PriceofFreedom.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

Tensor Decomposition Networks for Fast Machine Learning Interatomic Potential Computations

SO(3)-equivariant networks are the dominant models for machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). The key operation of such networks is the Clebsch-Gordan (CG) tensor product, which is computationally expensive. To accelerate the computation, we develop tensor decomposition networks (TDNs) as a class of approximately equivariant networks in which CG tensor products are replaced by low-rank tensor decompositions, such as the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition. With the CP decomposition, we prove (i) a uniform bound on the induced error of SO(3)-equivariance, and (ii) the universality of approximating any equivariant bilinear map. To further reduce the number of parameters, we propose path-weight sharing that ties all multiplicity-space weights across the O(L^3) CG paths into a single shared parameter set without compromising equivariance, where L is the maximum angular degree. The resulting layer acts as a plug-and-play replacement for tensor products in existing networks, and the computational complexity of tensor products is reduced from O(L^6) to O(L^4). We evaluate TDNs on PubChemQCR, a newly curated molecular relaxation dataset containing 105 million DFT-calculated snapshots. We also use existing datasets, including OC20, and OC22. Results show that TDNs achieve competitive performance with dramatic speedup in computations. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMol/TDN{https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/}).

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

LoRA3D: Low-Rank Self-Calibration of 3D Geometric Foundation Models

Emerging 3D geometric foundation models, such as DUSt3R, offer a promising approach for in-the-wild 3D vision tasks. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to specialize the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multi-view predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a single standard GPU within just 5 minutes. Each low-rank adapter requires only 18MB of storage. We evaluated our method on more than 160 scenes from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to 88% performance improvement on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

Analytical sensitivity curves of the second-generation time-delay interferometry

Forthcoming space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors will employ second-generation time-delay interferometry (TDI) to suppress laser frequency noise and achieve the sensitivity required for GW detection. We introduce an inverse light-path operator P_{i_{1}i_{2}i_{3}ldots i_{n-1}i_{n}}, which enables simple representation of second-generation TDI combinations and a concise description of light propagation. Analytical expressions and high-accuracy approximate formulas are derived for the sky- and polarization-averaged response functions, noise power spectral densities (PSDs), and sensitivity curves of TDI Michelson, (alpha,beta,gamma), Monitor, Beacon, Relay, and Sagnac combinations, as well as their orthogonal A, E, T channels. Our results show that: (i) second-generation TDIs have the same sensitivities as their first-generation counterparts; (ii) the A, E, T sensitivities and the optimal sensitivity are independent of the TDI generation and specific combination; (iii) the A and E channels have equal averaged responses, noise PSDs, and sensitivities, while the T channel has much weaker response and sensitivity at low frequencies (2pi fL/clesssim3); (iv) except for the (alpha,beta,gamma) and zeta combinations and the T channel, all sensitivity curves exhibit a flat section in the range f_{n}<flesssim 1.5/(2pi L/c), where the noise-balance frequency f_{n} separates the proof-mass- and optical-path-dominated regimes, while the response-transition frequency sim 1.5/(2pi L/c) separates the response function's low- and high-frequency behaviors; (v) the averaged response, noise PSD, and sensitivity of zeta scales with those of the T channel. These analytical and approximate formulations provide useful benchmarks for instrument optimization and data-analysis studies for future space-based GW detectors.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025

Self-supervised learning of Split Invariant Equivariant representations

Recent progress has been made towards learning invariant or equivariant representations with self-supervised learning. While invariant methods are evaluated on large scale datasets, equivariant ones are evaluated in smaller, more controlled, settings. We aim at bridging the gap between the two in order to learn more diverse representations that are suitable for a wide range of tasks. We start by introducing a dataset called 3DIEBench, consisting of renderings from 3D models over 55 classes and more than 2.5 million images where we have full control on the transformations applied to the objects. We further introduce a predictor architecture based on hypernetworks to learn equivariant representations with no possible collapse to invariance. We introduce SIE (Split Invariant-Equivariant) which combines the hypernetwork-based predictor with representations split in two parts, one invariant, the other equivariant, to learn richer representations. We demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance related tasks from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We further analyze our introduced predictor and show how it steers the learned latent space. We hope that both our introduced dataset and approach will enable learning richer representations without supervision in more complex scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SIE.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14, 2023