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Differentiable Euler Characteristic Transforms for Shape Classification (arxiv.org)
2 points by Pseudomanifold on Mar 18, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A shape summary that counts connected pieces and holes as a line sweeps across it is turned into a learnable layer, so it can be tuned for a specific task. It matches more complex models on graph and point cloud classification while being faster.

Abstract

The Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) has proven to be a powerful representation, combining geometrical and topological characteristics of shapes and graphs. However, the ECT was hitherto unable to learn task-specific representations. We overcome this issue and develop a novel computational layer that enables learning the ECT in an end-to-end fashion. Our method, the Differentiable Euler Characteristic Transform (DECT), is fast and computationally efficient, while exhibiting performance on a par with more complex models in both graph and point cloud classification tasks. Moreover, we show that this seemingly simple statistic provides the same topological expressivity as more complex topological deep learning layers.

Ernst Roell, Bastian Rieck
arXiv:2310.07630 · cs.LG · submitted Oct 11, 2023 · updated Mar 19, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at ICLR 2024 (https://openreview.net/forum?id=MO632iPq3I)

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