Riemannian Neural Geodesic Interpolant

Abstract: Stochastic interpolants are efficient generative models that bridge two arbitrary probability density functions in finite time, enabling flexible generation from the source to the target distribution or vice versa. These models are primarily developed in Euclidean space, and are therefore limited in their application to many distribution learning problems defined on Riemannian manifolds in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce the Riemannian Neural Geodesic Interpolant (RNGI) model, which interpolates between two probability densities on a Riemannian manifold along the stochastic geodesics, and then samples from one endpoint as the final state using the continuous flow originating from the other endpoint. We prove that the temporal marginal density of RNGI solves a transport equation on the Riemannian manifold. After training the model's the neural velocity and score fields, we propose the Embedding Stochastic Differential Equation (E-SDE) algorithm for stochastic sampling of RNGI. E-SDE significantly improves the sampling quality by reducing the accumulated error caused by the excessive intrinsic discretization of Riemannian Brownian motion in the classical Geodesic Random Walk (GRW) algorithm. We also provide theoretical bounds on the generative bias measured in terms of KL-divergence. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RNGI and E-SDE through experiments conducted on both collected and synthetic distributions on S2 and SO(3).