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Anthea Monod

Anthea Monod contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Approximating Persistent Homology for Large Datasets

Persistent homology is an important methodology in topological data analysis which adapts theory from algebraic topology to data settings. Computing persistent homology produces persistence diagrams, which have been successfully used in diverse domains. Despite its widespread use, persistent homology is simply impossible to compute when a dataset is very large. We study a statistical approach to the problem of computing persistent homology for massive datasets using a multiple subsampling framework and extend it to three summaries of persistent homology: Hölder continuous vectorizations of persistence diagrams; the alternative representation as persistence measures; and standard persistence diagrams. Specifically, we derive finite sample convergence rates for empirical means for persistent homology and practical guidance on interpreting and tuning parameters. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data. We demonstrate the performance of multiple subsampling in a permutation test to analyze the topological structure of Poincaré embeddings of large lexical databases.

preprint2026arXiv

Entropic Riemannian Neural Optimal Transport

Many machine learning problems involve data supported on curved spaces such as spheres, rotation groups, hyperbolic spaces, and general Riemannian manifolds, where Euclidean geometry can distort distances, averages, and the resulting optimal transport (OT) problem. Existing manifold OT methods have pursued amortized out-of-sample maps, while entropic regularization has made discrete OT more scalable, but these advantages have remained largely disjoint. We propose Entropic Riemannian Neural Optimal Transport (Entropic RNOT), a unified framework that combines intrinsic entropic OT with amortized out-of-sample evaluation on Riemannian manifolds. Our method learns a single target-side Schrödinger potential through a neural pullback parameterization, recovers the induced Gibbs coupling, and uses the resulting conditional laws to construct intrinsic transport surrogates. These include barycentric projections on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds and heat-smoothed conditional surrogates on stochastically complete manifolds, the latter turning possibly atomic target laws into absolutely continuous ones. For fixed regularization $\varepsilon>0$, we prove that the proposed hypothesis class recovers the entropic optimal coupling in strong probabilistic metrics. As consequences, barycentric surrogates converge in $L^2$, while heat-smoothed surrogates are stable at fixed heat time and asymptotically unbiased as the heat time vanishes. The guarantees hold for compactly supported data on possibly noncompact manifolds. Empirically, our method matches or improves over Euclidean, tangent-space, and log-Euclidean baselines on benchmarks over $\mathbb{S}^2$, $\mathrm{SO}(3)$, $\mathrm{SPD}(3)$, $\mathrm{SE}(3)$, and $\mathbb{H}^2$, scales favorably relative to discrete manifold Sinkhorn, and in a protein-ligand docking application, refines poses on $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ without retraining or per-instance optimization.

preprint2026arXiv

Feature Starvation as Geometric Instability in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to disentangle the dense, polysemantic internal representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable, monosemantic concepts. However, standard $\ell_1$-regularized SAEs suffer from feature starvation (dead neurons) and shrinkage bias, often requiring computationally expensive heuristic resampling and nondifferentiable hard-masking methods to bypass these challenges. We argue that feature starvation is not merely an empirical artifact of poor data diversity, but a fundamental optimization-geometric pathology of overcomplete dictionaries: the $\ell_1$-induced sparse coding map is unstable and fundamentally misaligned with shallow, amortized encoders. To address this structural instability, we introduce adaptive elastic net SAEs (AEN-SAEs), a fully differentiable architecture grounded in classical sparse regression. AEN-SAEs combine an $\ell_2$ structural term that enforces strong convexity and Lipschitz stability with adaptive $\ell_1$ reweighting that eliminates shrinkage bias and suppresses spurious features, thereby jointly controlling the curvature and interaction structure of the induced polyhedral geometry. Theoretically, we show that AEN-SAEs yield a Lipschitz-continuous sparse coding map and recover the global feature support under mild assumptions. Empirically, across synthetic settings and LLMs (Pythia 70M, Llama 3.1 8B), AEN-SAEs mitigate feature starvation without auxiliary heuristics while maintaining competitive reconstruction abilities.

preprint2026arXiv

Topological Signatures of Grokking

We study the grokking phenomenon through the lens of topology. Using persistent homology on point clouds derived from the embedding matrices of a range of models trained on modular arithmetic with varying primes, we identify a clear and consistent topological signature of grokking: a sharp increase in both the maximum and total persistence of first homology ($H_1$). Persistence diagrams reveal the emergence of a dominant long-lived topological feature together with increasingly structured secondary features, reflecting the underlying cyclic structure of the task. Compared to existing spectral and geometric diagnostics -- specifically, Fourier analysis and local intrinsic dimension -- persistent homology provides a unified geometric and topological characterization of representation learning, capturing both local and global multi-scale structure. Ablations across data regimes and control settings show that these topological transitions are tied to generalization rather than memorization. Our results suggest that persistent homology offers a principled and interpretable framework for analyzing how neural networks internalize latent structure during training.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Linear Non-Gaussian Polytree Models

In the context of graphical causal discovery, we adapt the versatile framework of linear non-Gaussian acyclic models (LiNGAMs) to propose new algorithms to efficiently learn graphs that are polytrees. Our approach combines the Chow--Liu algorithm, which first learns the undirected tree structure, with novel schemes to orient the edges. The orientation schemes assess algebraic relations among moments of the data-generating distribution and are computationally inexpensive. We establish high-dimensional consistency results for our approach and compare different algorithmic versions in numerical experiments.

preprint2022arXiv

Rewiring Networks for Graph Neural Network Training Using Discrete Geometry

Information over-squashing is a phenomenon of inefficient information propagation between distant nodes on networks. It is an important problem that is known to significantly impact the training of graph neural networks (GNNs), as the receptive field of a node grows exponentially. To mitigate this problem, a preprocessing procedure known as rewiring is often applied to the input network. In this paper, we investigate the use of discrete analogues of classical geometric notions of curvature to model information flow on networks and rewire them. We show that these classical notions achieve state-of-the-art performance in GNN training accuracy on a variety of real-world network datasets. Moreover, compared to the current state-of-the-art, these classical notions exhibit a clear advantage in computational runtime by several orders of magnitude.

preprint2022arXiv

Tropical Geometry of Phylogenetic Tree Space: A Statistical Perspective

Phylogenetic trees are the fundamental mathematical representation of evolutionary processes in biology. They are also objects of interest in pure mathematics, such as algebraic geometry and combinatorics, due to their discrete geometry. Although they are important data structures, they face the significant challenge that sets of trees form a non-Euclidean phylogenetic tree space, which means that standard computational and statistical methods cannot be directly applied. In this work, we explore the statistical feasibility of a pure mathematical representation of the set of all phylogenetic trees based on tropical geometry for both descriptive and inferential statistics, and unsupervised and supervised machine learning. Our exploration is both theoretical and practical. We show that the tropical geometric phylogenetic tree space endowed with a generalized Hilbert projective metric exhibits analytic, geometric, and topological properties that are desirable for theoretical studies in probability and statistics and allow for well-defined questions to be posed. We illustrate the statistical feasibility of the tropical geometric perspective for phylogenetic trees with an example of both a descriptive and inferential statistical task. Moreover, this approach exhibits increased computational efficiency and statistical performance over the current state-of-the-art, which we illustrate with a real data example on seasonal influenza. Our results demonstrate the viability of the tropical geometric setting for parametric statistical and probabilistic studies of sets of phylogenetic trees.