AQuaMaM: An Autoregressive, Quaternion Manifold Model for Rapidly Estimating Complex SO(3) Distributions

Michael A. Alcorn

Abstract: Accurately modeling complex, multimodal distributions is necessary for optimal decision-making, but doing so for rotations in three-dimensions, i.e., the SO(3) group, is challenging due to the curvature of the rotation manifold. The recently described implicit-PDF (IPDF) is a simple, elegant, and effective approach for learning arbitrary distributions on SO(3) up to a given precision. However, inference with IPDF requires $N$ forward passes through the network's final multilayer perceptron—where $N$ places an upper bound on the likelihood that can be calculated by the model—which is prohibitively slow for those without the computational resources necessary to parallelize the queries. In this paper, I introduce AQuaMaM, a neural network capable of both learning complex distributions on the rotation manifold and calculating exact likelihoods for query rotations in a single forward pass. Specifically, AQuaMaM autoregressively models the projected components of unit quaternions as a mixture of uniform distributions that partition their geometrically-restricted domain of values. On an "infinite" toy dataset with ambiguous viewpoints, AQuaMaM rapidly converges to a sampling distribution closely matching the true data distribution. In contrast, the sampling distribution for IPDF dramatically diverges from the true data distribution, despite IPDF approaching its theoretical minimum evaluation loss during training. On a constructed dataset of 500,000 renders of a die in different rotations, an AQuaMaM model trained from scratch reaches a log-likelihood 14% higher than an IPDF model using a pretrained ResNet-50. Further, compared to IPDF, AQuaMaM uses 24% fewer parameters, has a prediction throughput 52$\times$ faster on a single GPU, and converges in a similar amount of time during training.

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