Equivariant neural networks and equivarification

Erkao Bao, Linqi Song

Abstract: A key difference from existing works is that our equivarification method can be applied without knowledge of the detailed functions of a layer in a neural network, and hence, can be generalized to any feedforward neural networks. Although the network size scales up, the constructed equivariant neural network does not increase the complexity of the network compared with the original one, in terms of the number of parameters. As an illustration, we build an equivariant neural network for image classification by equivarifying a convolutional neural network. Results show that our proposed method significantly reduces the design and training complexity, yet preserving the learning performance in terms of accuracy.

Code: https://github.com/symplecticgeometry/equivariant-neural-networks-and-equivarification

Keywords: equivariant, invariant, neural network, equivarification