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Tutorial
(Track2) Equivariant Networks
Risi Kondor · Taco Cohen

Mon Dec 07 02:30 AM -- 05:00 AM (PST) @
in Tutorial Track 2A »

There is great interest in generalizing deep learning to more exotic types of data, such as graphs, chemical structures, volumetric images, omndirectional images, etc. In each case, the data has nontrivial structure and symmetries and the challenge is to find the right generalization of classical neural network layers like convolution to reflect this. It has become clear that in all of these cases and more, equivariance to symmetry transformations is the key principle that points us to an effective generalization.

New architectures inspired by this principle have already proved their effectiveness in multiple domains. However, some of the underlying ideas are still foreign to much of the community, partly because of the mathematics involved. The purpose of this tutorial is to bridge this gap by giving a very accessible introduction to this emerging area with many practical examples and details of how to implement equivariant architectures in existing deep learning frameworks.

Timetable: Part I (Taco Cohen) 0:00 - Introduction to equivariant networks 39:00 - Examples and applications 51:00 - Equivariant convolutions

Part II (Risi Kondor) 0:00 - Introduction 7:50 - Group Representations 27:35 - Designing equivariant Neurons 45:30 - Fourier theory 56:25 - Implementation

Author Information

Risi Kondor (Flatiron Institute)

Risi Kondor joined the Flatiron Institute in 2019 as a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Computational Mathematics. Previously, Kondor was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Statistics, and the Computational and Applied Mathematics Initiative at the University of Chicago. His research interests include computational harmonic analysis and machine learning. Kondor holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, an MS in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a diploma in Computational Fluid Dynamics from the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and a diploma in Physics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Taco Cohen (Qualcomm AI Research)

Taco Cohen is a machine learning research scientist at Qualcomm AI Research in Amsterdam and a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by prof. Max Welling. He was a co-founder of Scyfer, a company focussed on active deep learning, acquired by Qualcomm in 2017. He holds a BSc in theoretical computer science from Utrecht University and a MSc in artificial intelligence from the University of Amsterdam (both cum laude). His research is focussed on understanding and improving deep representation learning, in particular learning of equivariant and disentangled representations, data-efficient deep learning, learning on non-Euclidean domains, and applications of group representation theory and non-commutative harmonic analysis, as well as deep learning based source compression. He has done internships at Google Deepmind (working with Geoff Hinton) and OpenAI. He received the 2014 University of Amsterdam thesis prize, a Google PhD Fellowship, ICLR 2018 best paper award for “Spherical CNNs”, and was named one of 35 innovators under 35 in Europe by MIT in 2018.

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