Moser Flow: Divergence-based Generative Modeling on Manifolds

We are interested in learning generative models for complex geometries described via manifolds, such as spheres, tori, and other implicit surfaces. Current extensions of existing (Euclidean) generative models are restricted to specific geometries and typically suffer from high computational costs. We introduce Moser Flow (MF), a new class of generative models within the family of continuous normalizing flows (CNF). MF also produces a CNF via a solution to the change-of-variable formula, however differently from other CNF methods, its model (learned) density is parameterized as the source (prior) density minus the divergence of a neural network (NN). The divergence is a local, linear differential operator, easy to approximate and calculate on manifolds. Therefore, unlike other CNFs, MF does not require invoking or backpropagating through an ODE solver during training. Furthermore, representing the model density explicitly as the divergence of a NN rather than as a solution of an ODE facilitates learning high fidelity densities. Theoretically, we prove that MF constitutes a universal density approximator under suitable assumptions. Empirically, we demonstrate for the first time the use of flow models for sampling from general curved surfaces and achieve significant improvements in density estimation, sample quality, and training complexity over existing CNFs on challenging synthetic geometries and real-world benchmarks from the earth and climate sciences.

Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

Riemannian Convex Potential Maps

Modeling distributions on Riemannian manifolds is a crucial component in understanding non-Euclidean data that arises, e.g., in physics and geology. The budding approaches in this space are limited by representational and computational tradeoffs. We propose and study a class of flows that uses convex potentials from Riemannian optimal transport. These are universal and can model distributions on any compact Riemannian manifold without requiring domain knowledge of the manifold to be integrated into the architecture. We demonstrate that these flows can model standard distributions on spheres, and tori, on synthetic and geological data. Our source code is freely available online at http://github.com/facebookresearch/rcpm

Phase Transitions, Distance Functions, and Implicit Neural Representations

Representing surfaces as zero level sets of neural networks recently emerged as a powerful modeling paradigm, named Implicit Neural Representations (INRs), serving numerous downstream applications in geometric deep learning and 3D vision. Training INRs previously required choosing between occupancy and distance function representation and different losses with unknown limit behavior and/or bias. In this paper we draw inspiration from the theory of phase transitions of fluids and suggest a loss for training INRs that learns a density function that converges to a proper occupancy function, while its log transform converges to a distance function. Furthermore, we analyze the limit minimizer of this loss showing it satisfies the reconstruction constraints and has minimal surface perimeter, a desirable inductive bias for surface reconstruction. Training INRs with this new loss leads to state-of-the-art reconstructions on a standard benchmark.

Isometric Autoencoders

High dimensional data is often assumed to be concentrated near a low-dimensional manifold. Autoencoders (AE) is a popular technique to learn representations of such data by pushing it through a neural network with a low dimension bottleneck while minimizing a reconstruction error. Using high capacity AE often leads to a large collection of minimizers, many of which represent a low dimensional manifold that fits the data well but generalizes poorly. Two sources of bad generalization are: extrinsic, where the learned manifold possesses extraneous parts that are far from the data; and intrinsic, where the encoder and decoder introduce arbitrary distortion in the low dimensional parameterization. An approach taken to alleviate these issues is to add a regularizer that favors a particular solution; common regularizers promote sparsity, small derivatives, or robustness to noise. In this paper, we advocate an isometry (ie, distance preserving) regularizer. Specifically, our regularizer encourages: (i) the decoder to be an isometry; and (ii) the encoder to be a pseudo-isometry, where pseudo-isometry is an extension of an isometry with an orthogonal projection operator. In a nutshell, (i) preserves all geometric properties of the data such as volume, length, angle, and probability density. It fixes the intrinsic degree of freedom since any two isometric decoders to the same manifold will differ by a rigid motion. (ii) Addresses the extrinsic degree of freedom by minimizing derivatives in orthogonal directions to the manifold and hence disfavoring complicated manifold solutions. Experimenting with the isometry regularizer on dimensionality reduction tasks produces useful low-dimensional data representations, while incorporating it in AE models leads to an improved generalization.

From Graph Low-Rank Global Attention to 2-FWL Approximation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are known to have an expressive power bounded by that of the vertex coloring algorithm (Xu et al., 2019a; Morris et al., 2018). However, for rich node features, such a bound does not exist and GNNs can be shown to be universal, namely, have the theoretical ability to approximate arbitrary graph functions. It is well known, however, that expressive power alone does not imply good generalization. In an effort to improve generalization of GNNs we suggest the Low-Rank Global Attention (LRGA) module, taking advantage of the efficiency of low rank matrix-vector multiplication, that improves the algorithmic alignment (Xu et al., 2019b) of GNNs with the 2-folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman (FWL) algorithm; 2-FWL is a graph isomorphism algorithm that is strictly more powerful than vertex coloring. Concretely, we: (i) formulate 2-FWL using polynomial kernels; (ii) show LRGA aligns with this 2-FWL formulation; and (iii) bound the sample complexity of the kernel's feature map when learned with a randomly initialized two-layer MLP. The latter means the generalization error can be made arbitrarily small when training LRGA to learn the 2-FWL algorithm. From a practical point of view, augmenting existing GNN layers with LRGA produces state of the art results on most datasets in a GNN standard benchmark.

SAL++: Sign Agnostic Learning with Derivatives

Learning 3D geometry directly from raw data, such as point clouds, triangle soups, or un-oriented meshes is still a challenging task that feeds many downstream computer vision and graphics applications. In this paper, we introduce SAL++: a method for learning implicit neural representations of shapes directly from such raw data. We build upon the recent sign agnostic learning (SAL) approach and generalize it to include derivative data in a sign agnostic manner. In more detail, given the unsigned distance function to the input raw data, we suggest a novel sign agnostic regression loss, incorporating both pointwise values and gradients of the unsigned distance function. Optimizing this loss leads to a signed implicit function solution, the zero level set of which is a high quality, valid manifold approximation to the input 3D data. We demonstrate the efficacy of SAL++ shape space learning from two challenging datasets: ShapeNet that contains inconsistent orientation and non-manifold meshes, and D-Faust that contains raw 3D scans (triangle soups). On both these datasets, we present state-of-the-art results.

Universal Differentiable Renderer for Implicit Neural Representations

The goal of this work is to learn implicit 3D shape representation with 2D supervision (i.e., a collection of images). To that end we introduce the Universal Differentiable Renderer (UDR) a neural network architecture that can provably approximate reflected light from an implicit neural representation of a 3D surface, under a wide set of reflectance properties and lighting conditions. Experimenting with the task of multiview 3D reconstruction, we find our model to improve upon the baselines in the accuracy of the reconstructed 3D geometry and rendering from unseen viewing directions.

Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes

Representing shapes as level sets of neural networks has been recently proved to be useful for different shape analysis and reconstruction tasks So far, such representations were computed using either: (i) pre-computed implicit shape representations; or (ii) loss functions explicitly defined over the neural level sets. In this paper we offer a new paradigm for computing high fidelity implicit neural representations directly from raw data (i.e., point clouds, with or without normal information). We observe that a rather simple loss function, encouraging the neural network to vanish on the input point cloud and to have a unit norm gradient, possesses an implicit geometric regularization property that favors smooth and natural zero level set surfaces, avoiding bad zero-loss solutions. We provide a theoretical analysis of this property for the linear case, and show that, in practice, our method leads to state of the art implicit neural representations with higher level-of-details and fidelity compared to previous methods.

Set2Graph: Learning Graphs From Sets

Many problems in machine learning (ML) can be cast as learning functions from sets to graphs, or more generally to hypergraphs; in short, Set2Graph functions. Examples include clustering, learning vertex and edge features on graphs, and learning triplet data in a collection. Current neural network models that approximate Set2Graph functions come from two main ML sub-fields: equivariant learning, and similarity learning. Equivariant models would be in general computationally challenging or even infeasible, while similarity learning models can be shown to have limited expressive power. In this paper we suggest a neural network model family for learning Set2Graph functions that is both practical and of maximal expressive power (universal), that is, can approximate arbitrary continuous Set2Graph functions over compact sets. Testing our models on different machine learning tasks, including an application to particle physics, we find them favorable to existing baselines.