In plain words: Instead of assuming one symmetry group fits the whole space, this tool learns a separate group for each neighborhood by training local predictors and finding the transformations they respect. It found local groups with several separate parts in physics tests and improved climate and vision task performance.
Abstract · AtlasD: Automatic Local Symmetry Discovery
Existing symmetry discovery methods predominantly focus on global transformations across the entire system or space, but they fail to consider the symmetries in local neighborhoods. This may result in the reported symmetry group being a misrepresentation of the true symmetry. In this paper, we formalize the notion of local symmetry as atlas equivariance. Our proposed pipeline, automatic local symmetry discovery (AtlasD), recovers the local symmetries of a function by training local predictor networks and then learning a Lie group basis to which the predictors are equivariant. We demonstrate AtlasD is capable of discovering local symmetry groups with multiple connected components in top-quark tagging and partial differential equation experiments. The discovered local symmetry is shown to be a useful inductive bias that improves the performance of downstream tasks in climate segmentation and vision tasks.
Manu Bhat, Jonghyun Park, Jianke Yang, Nima Dehmamy, Robin Walters, Rose Yu
arXiv:2504.10777 · cs.LG · submitted Apr 15, 2025 · updated Jun 13, 2025
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