What is an equivariant neural network?

Understand

We explain equivariant neural networks, a notion underlying breakthroughs in machine learning from deep convolutional neural networks for computer vision to AlphaFold 2 for protein structure prediction, without assuming knowledge of equivariance or neural networks.

• The basic mathematical ideas are simple but are often obscured by engineering complications that come with practical realizations.
• We extract and focus on the mathematical aspects, and limit ourselves to a cursory treatment of the engineering issues at the end.