Learning Linear Groups in Neural Networks
Emmanouil Theodosis Karim Helwani Demba Ba
Employing equivariance in neural networks leads to greater parameter
efficiency and improved generalization performance through the encoding of
domain knowledge in the architecture; however, the majority of existing
approaches require an a priori specification of the desired symmetries. We
present a neural network architecture, Linear Group Networks (LGNs), for
learning linear groups acting on the weight space of neural networks. Linear
groups are desirable due to their inherent interpretability, as they can be
represented as finite matrices. LGNs learn groups without any supervision or
knowledge of the hidden symmetries in the data and the groups can be mapped to
well known operations in machine learning. We use LGNs to learn groups on
multiple datasets while considering different downstream tasks; we demonstrate
that the linear group structure depends on both the data distribution and the
considered task.