Skip to content
#machine learning Preprint Open access

LexiCan: Lexicographic Canonicalization of Point Clouds for Machine Learning Applications

Daniel Sanchez Djordje Mihajlovic Federica Valeau Luka Beni\'c Raghuwansh Raj Soutrik Sarangi Snir Hordan
Oct 2026
Machine Learning

Abstract

Canonicalization resolves the rotational and permutation ambiguity of 3D point clouds by selecting a unique orbit representative, maintaining their geometric information while allowing standard architectures, such as Transformers, to operate on them. Existing canonicalizations, however, exhibit discontinuity jumps on molecular configurations and non-trivial invariance errors in popular molecular datasets, which lead to ambiguity in their representation. To bridge this gap, we introduce LexiCan, a canonicalization that is provably invariant under either $O(3)$ or $SO(3)$, empirically invariant to rotations to within $\sim 10^{-6}$ angstroms on the QM9 and QM-sym molecular datasets, and mitigates discontinuity jumps on QM-sym, while running orders of magnitude faster than an existing canonicalization. Finally, non-invariant models perform better on QM9 property prediction and ModelNet40 shape classification with LexiCan than with that canonicalization.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Jun 2018

Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

This paper investigates developing real-world perception for active agents, proposes Gibson Environment for this purpose, and showcases a set of perceptual tasks learned therein.

F. Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He et al. · 1,069 citations · ⚡112
#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2014

Software development in startup companies: A systematic mapping study

The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al. · 394 citations · ⚡54

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.

Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al. · 316 citations · ⚡15

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequenc...

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al. · 302 citations · ⚡60

KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization

This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.

Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff et al. · 195 citations · ⚡28

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.