arXiv subjects

Sarah Harkins Dayton

Publications and source records attributed to Sarah Harkins Dayton.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Manifold Navigation Learning Using Recurrent Networks: Efficient Training Techniques

Position tracking is a well-studied problem in Euclidean navigation, yet comparatively little attention has been given to navigation on general manifolds, where motion is governed by the underlying geometry of the space. In this work, we formalize the problem of manifold navigation as a velocity-driven tracking task and propose a coordinate-chart-based learning framework in which learning models operate entirely in a Euclidean representation. Predicted trajectories are mapped to the manifold via an immersion function prior to error computation, allowing geometric consistency to be evaluated without explicitly enforcing manifold constraints during learning. Within this framework, we focus on Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for sequential position prediction on curved manifolds after comparisons with alternative recurrent architectures. We evaluate our GRU models, trained with pertinent custom loss functions, against both a standard MSE loss function and a naive vector-addition baseline. We evaluate our approach on both analytically (and numerically) defined manifolds, as well as a surface reconstructed from a LiDAR point cloud. Our results show that recurrent models can learn to approximate manifold-constrained dynamics from velocity sequences and consistently outperform Euclidean baselines. Our results demonstrate that certain custom loss functions significantly improve long-horizon prediction accuracy compared to conventional point-wise loss functions.

cs.CV↗

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

Bayesian Topological Convolutional Neural Nets

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been established as the main workhorse in image data processing; nonetheless, they require large amounts of data to train, often produce overconfident predictions, and frequently lack the ability to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. To address these concerns, we propose a new Bayesian topological CNN that promotes a novel interplay between topology-aware learning and Bayesian sampling. Specifically, it utilizes information from important manifolds to accelerate training while reducing calibration error by placing prior distributions on network parameters and properly learning appropriate posteriors. One important contribution of our work is the inclusion of a consistency condition in the learning cost, which can effectively modify the prior distributions to improve the performance of our novel network architecture. We evaluate the model on benchmark image classification datasets and demonstrate its superiority over conventional CNNs, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), and topological CNNs. In particular, we supply evidence that our method provides an advantage in situations where training data is limited or corrupted. Furthermore, we show that the new model allows for better uncertainty quantification than standard BNNs since it can more readily identify examples of out-of-distribution data on which it has not been trained. Our results highlight the potential of our novel hybrid approach for more efficient and robust image classification.

cs.CV↗