Layal Bou Hamdan | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

From Classical to Topological Neural Networks Under Uncertainty

This chapter explores neural networks, topological data analysis, and topological deep learning techniques, alongside statistical Bayesian methods, for processing images, time series, and graphs to maximize the potential of artificial intelligence in the military domain. Throughout the chapter, we highlight practical applications spanning image, video, audio, and time-series recognition, fraud detection, and link prediction for graphical data, illustrating how topology-aware and uncertainty-aware models can enhance robustness, interpretability, and generalization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Topological Data Analysis and Topological Deep Learning Beyond Persistent Homology -- A Review

Topological data analysis (TDA) is a rapidly evolving field in applied mathematics and data science that leverages tools from topology to uncover robust, shape-driven insights in complex datasets. The main workhorse is persistent homology, a technique rooted in algebraic topology. Paired with topological deep learning (TDL) or topological machine learning, persistent homology has achieved tremendous success in a wide variety of applications in science, engineering, medicine, and industry. However, persistent homology has many limitations due to its high-level abstraction, insensitivity to non-topological changes, and reliance on point cloud data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of TDA and TDL beyond persistent homology. It analyzes how persistent topological Laplacians and Dirac operators provide spectral representations to capture both topological invariants and homotopic evolution. Other formulations are presented in terms of sheaf theory, Mayer topology, and interaction topology. For data on differentiable manifolds, techniques rooted in differential topology, such as persistent de Rham cohomology, persistent Hodge Laplacian, and Hodge decomposition, are reviewed. For one-dimensional (1D) curves embedded in 3-space, approaches from geometric topology are discussed, including multiscale Gauss-link integrals, persistent Jones polynomials, and persistent Khovanov homology. This paper further discusses the appropriate selection of topological tools for different input data, such as point clouds, sequential data, data on manifolds, curves embedded in 3-space, and data with additional non-geometric information. A review is also given of various topological representations, software packages, and machine learning vectorizations. Finally, this review ends with concluding remarks.

math.HO↗

arXiv2024

Bayesian Sheaf Neural Networks

Equipping graph neural networks with a convolution operation defined in terms of a cellular sheaf offers advantages for learning expressive representations of heterophilic graph data. The most flexible approach to constructing the sheaf is to learn it as part of the network as a function of the node features. However, this leaves the network potentially overly sensitive to the learned sheaf. As a counter-measure, we propose a variational approach to learning cellular sheaves within sheaf neural networks, yielding an architecture we refer to as a Bayesian sheaf neural network. As part of this work, we define a novel family of reparameterizable probability distributions on the rotation group $SO(n)$ using the Cayley transform. We evaluate the Bayesian sheaf neural network on several graph datasets, and show that our Bayesian sheaf models achieve leading performance compared to baseline models and are less sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters under limited training data settings.

cs.LG↗