The Geometry of Synchronization Problems and Learning Group Actions

We develop a geometric framework that characterizes the synchronization problem --- the problem of consistently registering or aligning a collection of objects. The theory we formulate characterizes the cohomological nature of synchronization based on the classical theory of fibre bundles. We first establish the correspondence between synchronization problems in a topological group G over a connected graph Gamma and the moduli space of flat principal G-bundles over Gamma, and develop a discrete analogy of the renowned theorem of classifying flat principal bundles with fix base and structural group using the representation variety. In particular, we show that prescribing an edge potential on a graph is equivalent to specifying an equivalence class of flat principal bundles, of which the triviality of holonomy dictates the synchronizability of the edge potential. We then develop a twisted cohomology theory for associated vector bundles of the flat principal bundle arising from an edge potential, which is a discrete version of the twisted cohomology in differential geometry. This theory realizes the obstruction to synchronizability as a cohomology group of the twisted de Rham cochain complex. We then build a discrete twisted Hodge theory --- a fibre bundle analog of the discrete Hodge theory on graphs --- which geometrically realizes the graph connection Laplacian as a Hodge Laplacian of degree zero. Motivated by our geometric framework, we study the problem of learning group actions --- partitioning a collection of objects based on the local synchronizability of pairwise correspondence relations. A dual interpretation is to learn finitely generated subgroups of an ambient transformation group from noisy observed group elements. A synchronization-based algorithm is also provided, and we demonstrate its efficacy using simulations and real data.