Finsler Geometry, Graph Neural Networks, and You

Researchers introduced Finslerian graph neural networks, a new architecture that estimates the Finsler Laplacian on point clouds and converges to the true operator on manifolds. This approach extends graph neural networks beyond isotropic operators, enabling recovery of geometry underlying nonlinear diffusion equations.

arXiv:2606.17185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural network architectures based on the graph Laplacian approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator, thus limiting their application to isotropic operators. As a nonlinear alternative to the Laplace-Beltrami operator, we consider estimates of the Finsler Laplacian on point clouds sampled from a manifold. We prove that these discrete estimates converge to the true operator on the manifold as the number of point samples grows. Moreover, we show that this operator can be expressed as a graph neural network layer, which we use to define a family of Finslerian graph neural networks constrained to express Finsler geometry. We show that Finslerian graph neural networks recover the geometry underlying nonlinear diffusion equations in practice.