Decodable and Sample Invariant Continuous Object Encoder
Authors: Dehao Yuan,Furong Huang,Cornelia Fermuller,Yiannis Aloimonos
Presentation: ICLR 2024,Poster

Abstract: We propose Hyper-Dimensional Function Encoding (HDFE). Given samples of a continuous object (e.g. a function), HDFE produces an explicit vector representation of the given object, invariant to the sample distribution and density. Sample distribution and density invariance enables HDFE to consistently encode continuous objects regardless of their sampling, and therefore allows neural networks to receive continuous objects as inputs for machine learning tasks, such as classification and regression. Besides, HDFE does not require any training and is proved to map the object into an organized embedding space, which facilitates the training of the downstream tasks.  In addition, the encoding is decodable, which enables neural networks to regress continuous objects 
by regressing their encodings.  Therefore, HDFE serves as an interface for processing continuous objects. 

We apply HDFE to function-to-function mapping, where vanilla HDFE achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art algorithm. We apply HDFE to point cloud surface normal estimation, where a simple replacement from PointNet to HDFE leads to  12\% and 15\% error reductions in two benchmarks. 
In addition, by integrating HDFE into the PointNet-based SOTA network, we improve the SOTA baseline by 2.5\% and 1.7\% on the same benchmarks.