arXiv subjects

Peter Lippmann

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Lippmann.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Rotational Equivariance in Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Tutorial

Rotational symmetry is one of the most important structural principles in machine learning on 3D data. In applications ranging from physics and materials science to 3D computer vision, predictions should not depend on an arbitrary choice of coordinate frame. Rotational equivariance captures this requirement mathematically by enforcing that a rotation of the input induces a corresponding transformation of the model output. This tutorial provides a comprehensive introduction to rotational equivariance, starting from the physical and geometric intuition behind coordinate independence and building up the necessary machinery from geometric deep learning, group theory, and representation theory. We introduce message passing on Euclidean graphs, group actions and representations, spherical harmonics, Wigner matrices, tensor products, and Clebsch-Gordan decomposition, and explain how these ingredients give rise to modern equivariant architectures. We then survey the principal strategies for incorporating rotational equivariance in deep learning, including group convolutions, internal tensorial representations, and canonicalization-based methods, and discuss their practical strengths and limitations. The tutorial aims to lower the barrier to the subject by connecting the underlying mathematics to practical model design, by unifying ideas that are often expressed in different formal languages, and by helping practitioners choose among competing approaches through a clear discussion of their trade-offs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Equivariance by Local Canonicalization: A Matter of Representation

Equivariant neural networks offer strong inductive biases for learning from molecular and geometric data but often rely on specialized, computationally expensive tensor operations. We present a framework to transfers existing tensor field networks into the more efficient local canonicalization paradigm, preserving equivariance while significantly improving the runtime. Within this framework, we systematically compare different equivariant representations in terms of theoretical complexity, empirical runtime, and predictive accuracy. We publish the tensor_frames package, a PyTorchGeometric based implementation for local canonicalization, that enables straightforward integration of equivariance into any standard message passing neural network.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Lorentz-Equivariance without Limitations

Lorentz Local Canonicalization (LLoCa) ensures exact Lorentz-equivariance for arbitrary neural networks with minimal computational overhead. For the LHC, it equivariantly predicts local reference frames for each particle and propagates any-order tensorial information between them. We apply it to graph networks and transformers. We showcase its cutting-edge performance on amplitude regression, end-to-end event generation, and jet tagging. For jet tagging, we introduce a large top tagging dataset to benchmark LLoCa versions of a range of established benchmark architectures and highlight the importance of symmetry breaking.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Lorentz Local Canonicalization: How to Make Any Network Lorentz-Equivariant

Lorentz-equivariant neural networks are becoming the leading architectures for high-energy physics. Current implementations rely on specialized layers, limiting architectural choices. We introduce Lorentz Local Canonicalization (LLoCa), a general framework that renders any backbone network exactly Lorentz-equivariant. Using equivariantly predicted local reference frames, we construct LLoCa-transformers and graph networks. We adapt a recent approach for geometric message passing to the non-compact Lorentz group, allowing propagation of space-time tensorial features. Data augmentation emerges from LLoCa as a special choice of reference frame. Our models achieve competitive and state-of-the-art accuracy on relevant particle physics tasks, while being $4\times$ faster and using $10\times$ fewer FLOPs.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Stable and Accurate Orbital-Free DFT Powered by Machine Learning

Hohenberg and Kohn have proven that the electronic energy and the one-particle electron density can, in principle, be obtained by minimizing an energy functional with respect to the density. While decades of theoretical work have produced increasingly faithful approximations to this elusive exact energy functional, their accuracy is still insufficient for many applications, making it reasonable to try and learn it empirically. Using rotationally equivariant atomistic machine learning, we obtain for the first time a density functional that, when applied to the organic molecules in QM9, yields energies with chemical accuracy relative to the Kohn-Sham reference while also converging to meaningful electron densities. Augmenting the training data with densities obtained from perturbed potentials proved key to these advances. This work demonstrates that machine learning can play a crucial role in narrowing the gap between theory and the practical realization of Hohenberg and Kohn's vision, paving the way for more efficient calculations in large molecular systems.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2024

Beyond Canonicalization: How Tensorial Messages Improve Equivariant Message Passing

In numerous applications of geometric deep learning, the studied systems exhibit spatial symmetries and it is desirable to enforce these. For the symmetry of global rotations and reflections, this means that the model should be equivariant with respect to the transformations that form the group of $\mathrm O(d)$. While many approaches for equivariant message passing require specialized architectures, including non-standard normalization layers or non-linearities, we here present a framework based on local reference frames ("local canonicalization") which can be integrated with any architecture without restrictions. We enhance equivariant message passing based on local canonicalization by introducing tensorial messages to communicate geometric information consistently between different local coordinate frames. Our framework applies to message passing on geometric data in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension. We explicitly show how our approach can be adapted to make a popular existing point cloud architecture equivariant. We demonstrate the superiority of tensorial messages and achieve state-of-the-art results on normal vector regression and competitive results on other standard 3D point cloud tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Theory and Approximate Solvers for Branched Optimal Transport with Multiple Sources

Branched Optimal Transport (BOT) is a generalization of optimal transport in which transportation costs along an edge are subadditive. This subadditivity models an increase in transport efficiency when shipping mass along the same route, favoring branched transportation networks. We here study the NP-hard optimization of BOT networks connecting a finite number of sources and sinks in $\mathbb{R}^2$. First, we show how to efficiently find the best geometry of a BOT network for many sources and sinks, given a topology. Second, we argue that a topology with more than three edges meeting at a branching point is never optimal. Third, we show that the results obtained for the Euclidean plane generalize directly to optimal transportation networks on two-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. Finally, we present a simple but effective approximate BOT solver combining geometric optimization with a combinatorial optimization of the network topology.

cs.LG↗