Bispectral Neural Networks

We present a neural network architecture, Bispectral Neural Networks (BNNs) for learning representations that are invariant to the actions of compact commutative groups on the space over which a signal is defined. The model incorporates the ansatz of the bispectrum, an analytically defined group invariant that is complete--that is, it preserves all signal structure while removing only the variation due to group actions. Here, we demonstrate that BNNs are able to simultaneously learn groups, their irreducible representations, and corresponding equivariant and complete-invariant maps purely from the symmetries implicit in data. Further, we demonstrate that the completeness property endows these networks with strong invariance-based adversarial robustness. This work establishes Bispectral Neural Networks as a powerful computational primitive for robust invariant representation learning. A fundamental problem of intelligence is to model the transformation structure of the natural world. In the context of vision, translation, rotation, and scaling define symmetries of object categorization--the transformations that leave perceived object identity invariant. In audition, pitch and timbre define symmetries of speech recognition. Biological neural systems have learned these symmetries from the statistics of the natural world--either through evolution or accumulated experience. Here, we tackle the problem of learning symmetries in artificial neural networks. At the heart of the challenge lie two requirements that are frequently in tension: invariance to transformation structure and selectivity to pattern structure. In deep networks, operations such as max or average are commonly employed to achieve invariance to local transformations. Such operations are invariant to many natural transformations; however, they are also invariant to unnatural transformations that destroy image structure, such as pixel permutations.