# A Data-Driven Interpolation Method on Smooth Manifolds via Diffusion Processes and Voronoi Tessellations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03758/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

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- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Training behavior of deep neural network in frequency domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01251/) (2018)
- [Gaussian Process Kernels for Pattern Discovery and Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.4245/) (2013)
- [Theoretical Foundations of t-SNE for Visualizing High-Dimensional Clustered Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07536/) (2021)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Convex Risk Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13414/) (2021)
- [An Intuitive Tutorial to Gaussian Process Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10862/) (2020)
- [Sparse-View CT Reconstruction via Convolutional Sparse Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06228/) (2018)
- [Non-parametric adaptive bandwidth selection for kernel estimators of spatial intensity functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11902/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a data-driven interpolation framework for reconstructing real-valued functions on smooth manifolds from scattered pointwise observations. The method combines a Gaussian Nadaraya--Watson kernel interpolant with a Voronoi-adaptive bandwidth determined entirely by the geometry of the sampled data, yielding an explicit closed-form construction that requires neither training, iterative optimization, preprocessing, nor parameter tuning. The proposed interpolant satisfies several theoretical properties. It reproduces the observed data exactly, enforces a vanishing intrinsic gradient at every sample point, and, in the dense-sampling limit, attenuates high-frequency oscillatory components through the geometric regularization induced by the adaptive bandwidth. Furthermore, the construction admits an interpretation in terms of minimizing a discrete total variation--type functional, establishing a natural connection with compressed sensing and sparsity-promoting regularization. Unlike classical kernel interpolation methods employing a fixed global bandwidth, the proposed adaptive strategy automatically adjusts to the local sampling geometry through the Voronoi tessellation while preserving an explicit analytical formulation. Because the interpolant is available in closed form, the overall computational cost is entirely determined by the inference stage: evaluating the interpolant at a query point requires only the computation of Gaussian kernel weights and their weighted combination, resulting in linear complexity with respect to the number of sample points. In contrast to many data-driven interpolation approaches, no additional offline computational stage is required before inference.
