Learning Lie Group Symmetry Transformations with Neural Networks

The problem of detecting and quantifying the presence of symmetries in datasets is useful for model selection, generative modeling, and data analysis, amongst others. While existing methods for hard-coding transformations in neural networks require prior knowledge of the symmetries of the task at hand, this work focuses on discovering and characterizing unknown symmetries present in the dataset, namely, Lie group symmetry transformations beyond the traditional ones usually considered in the field (rotation, scaling, and translation). Specifically, we consider a scenario in which a dataset has been transformed by a one-parameter subgroup of transformations with different parameter values for each data point. Our goal is to characterize the transformation group and the distribution of the parameter values. The results showcase the effectiveness of the approach in both these settings.

Learning reversible symplectic dynamics

Time-reversal symmetry arises naturally as a structural property in many dynamical systems of interest. While the importance of hard-wiring symmetry is increasingly recognized in machine learning, to date this has eluded time-reversibility. In this paper we propose a new neural network architecture for learning time-reversible dynamical systems from data. We focus in particular on an adaptation to symplectic systems, because of their importance in physics-informed learning.