Azimuthal Rotational Equivariance in Spherical Convolutional Neural Networks

In this work, we analyze linear operators on the space of square integrable functions on the sphere. Specifically, we characterize the operators which are equivariant to azimuthal rotations, that is, rotations around the z-axis. Several high-performing neural networks defined on the sphere are equivariant to azimuthal rotations, but not to full SO(3) rotations. Our main result is to show that a linear operator acting on band-limited functions on the sphere is equivariant to azimuthal rotations if and only if it can be realized as a block-diagonal matrix acting on the spherical harmonic expansion coefficients of its input. Further, we show that such an operation can be interpreted as a convolution, or equivalently, a correlation in the spatial domain. Our theoretical findings are backed up with experimental results demonstrating that a state-of-the-art pipeline can be improved by making it equivariant to azimuthal rotations

ICML 2023 topological deep learning challenge. Design and results

This paper presents the computational challenge on topological deep learning that was hosted within the ICML 2023 Workshop on Topology and Geometry in Machine Learning. The competition asked participants to provide open-source implementations of topological neural networks from the literature by contributing to the python packages TopoNetX (data processing) and TopoModelX (deep learning). The challenge attracted twenty-eight qualifying submissions in its two-month duration. This paper describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main finding