Abstract:Do contemporary diffusion models preserve the class geometry of hyperspherical data? Standard diffusion models rely on isotropic Gaussian noise in the forward process, inherently favoring Euclidean spaces. However, many real-world problems involve non-Euclidean distributions, such as hyperspherical manifolds, where class-specific patterns are governed by angular geometry within hypercones. When modeled in Euclidean space, these angular subtleties are lost, leading to suboptimal generative performance. To address this limitation, we introduce HyperSphereDiff to align hyperspherical structures with directional noise, preserving class geometry and effectively capturing angular uncertainty. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this approach aligns the generative process with the intrinsic geometry of hyperspherical data, resulting in more accurate and geometry-aware generative models. We evaluate our framework on four object datasets and two face datasets, showing that incorporating angular uncertainty better preserves the underlying hyperspherical manifold. Resources are available at: {https://github.com/IAB-IITJ/Harmonizing-Geometry-and-Uncertainty-Diffusion-with-Hyperspheres/}
Abstract:Traditional deep learning models rely on methods such as softmax cross-entropy and ArcFace loss for tasks like classification and face recognition. These methods mainly explore angular features in a hyperspherical space, often resulting in entangled inter-class features due to dense angular data across many classes. In this paper, a new field of feature exploration is proposed known as HyperSpaceX which enhances class discrimination by exploring both angular and radial dimensions in multi-hyperspherical spaces, facilitated by a novel DistArc loss. The proposed DistArc loss encompasses three feature arrangement components: two angular and one radial, enforcing intra-class binding and inter-class separation in multi-radial arrangement, improving feature discriminability. Evaluation of HyperSpaceX framework for the novel representation utilizes a proposed predictive measure that accounts for both angular and radial elements, providing a more comprehensive assessment of model accuracy beyond standard metrics. Experiments across seven object classification and six face recognition datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art (SoTA) results obtained from HyperSpaceX, achieving up to a 20% performance improvement on large-scale object datasets in lower dimensions and up to 6% gain in higher dimensions.