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A Bochner Weitzenböck Decomposition for Cellular Sheaf Laplacians, Curvature and Neural Sheaf Diffusion

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Abstract

We extend the Bochner-Weitzenböck decomposition to cellular sheaf Laplacians, splitting it into a positive semidefinite term, the Bochner sheaf Laplacian, and a block diagonal term, the Forman curvature. We show that the Bochner Laplacians form a class of cellular sheaves that extends both connection and matrix-weighted Laplacians, and generalizes signed graphs to dd dimensions. We give a holonomy characterization of their kernel, prove the related Cheeger inequalities, and attach to them a random walk that generalizes the Gremban expansion. For the Forman term, we prove a discrete Bochner theorem, which bounds the first cohomology of a cellular sheaf with nonnegative curvature, and we read the whole decomposition as an opinion-dynamics model. We then apply this machinery to Sheaf Neural Networks, whose learnt Laplacian is otherwise unobserved. The Bochner interpretation yields a node-level conviction score that acts as an operational importance measure under frozen-model interventions, while the Forman profile provides a local descriptor of the learnt operator.

Introduction

A sheaf prescribes how local data glue into global data, and turns the obstruction to gluing into a cohomological invariant [1, 2, 3, 4]. On a graph or a simplicial complex, a cellular sheaf [5, 6] attaches a vector space to each cell and a linear map to each incidence, so that the theory becomes finite linear algebra. In this form sheaves have been used for fusing sensor readings [7], for distributed coordination and optimization [8, 9], and in topological data analysis [10, 11, 12], wherever a relation on a graph needs more than a scalar weight. Their central operator is the sheaf Laplacian, which has the foundations of a spectral theory [13] and a signal processing theory [14], and which models opinion dynamics, the stalks carrying private opinions and the restriction maps the discourse between agents [15].

In machine learning, where topology has entered from geometric deep learning [16] to higher-order domains such as simplicial complexes and hypergraphs [17, 18], the most notable application of sheaves is the Sheaf Neural Network [19, 20]. A graph neural network diffuses node features along the edges, and fails on heterophilic graphs, where neighbours tend to carry different labels. A Sheaf Neural Network learns a sheaf over the graph and diffuses with its sheaf Laplacian, so that each node transforms its message differently for each neighbour, which restores separation power on heterophilic data. The sheaf is then an object produced by training. The limiting behaviour of sheaf diffusion is described by the Hodge decomposition, which identifies the kernel of the sheaf Laplacian with sheaf cohomology. Three questions that are standard for the graph Laplacian, however, remain open for a general sheaf Laplacian. The first is spectral: a general spectral theory of cellular sheaves is still far from complete [13, 14], and Cheeger-type bounds, classical for graphs [21], are available only in special cases, notably connection Laplacians [22, 23]. The second is probabilistic: it is not clear how to attach to a sheaf Laplacian a vector-valued random walk, a question left open in [13]. The third is combinatorial: cellular sheaves lack an analogue of Forman’s Bochner decomposition [24], a local curvature, cheaper to compute than the spectrum and easier to interpret.

We address the three at once with a Bochner decomposition for cellular sheaves. Forman splits the Hodge Laplacian of a complex into a positive semidefinite term and a diagonal curvature term, using the absolute value of the off-diagonal entries; replacing it by the matrix absolute value ∣A∣:=AAT|A| := \sqrt{AA^{\mathsf{T}}} extends the construction to every symmetric block matrix, hence to every sheaf Laplacian, on a graph or on a complex. We call Bochner matrices the class of Laplacians the first term belongs to. It extends the connection Laplacians, the matrix-weighted Laplacians [25, 26] and the weighted signed graphs [27]: a Bochner matrix is an anisotropic connection Laplacian, in which a positive semidefinite matrix replaces the scalar weight of an edge. We show that its kernel admits the same holonomy characterization known for connection Laplacians.

We then prove Cheeger inequalities for Bochner matrices, extending those of Bandeira, Singer and Spielman for connection Laplacians [22]: they relate the low eigenvalues of the normalized Bochner Laplacian to three frustration constants, the residuals of synchronization over Sd−1S^{d-1}, partial or full, and over O(d)O(d). We also attach to a Bochner matrix a random walk on V×Sd−1V \times S^{d-1}, whose jump law depends on the orientation the walker carries. In the language of signed graphs it is a generalized Gremban expansion, each node being lifted to a whole sphere instead of two copies, and in the isotropic case it recovers the vector-valued walk of the connection Laplacian [23]. These two results answer the spectral and the probabilistic question.

The Forman term answers the combinatorial one. It is block diagonal, each block computed from the restriction maps at a single node. On 1-cells we call it the sheaf Forman Ricci curvature, and we prove a Bochner theorem for cellular sheaves: under nonnegative curvature, the first sheaf cohomology of a compact connected combinatorial nn-manifold with dd-dimensional stalks has dimension at most ndnd for n≤3n \le3, and at most d⋅D(M)d \cdot D(M) in any dimension, with D(M)D(M) the local homological dimension of the complex. Together, the two terms give the decomposition a dynamical reading that generalizes [28]: sheaf diffusion can be seen as a reaction-diffusion process, the Bochner term diffusive and the Forman term reactive. On a graph this is an opinion dynamics model, in which the Bochner term drives the agents towards a common conviction, the norm a stalk carries, and the Forman block measures how loudly an agent speaks relative to its neighbours, its relative volume.

We then return to Sheaf Neural Networks. The available theory describes what they can represent: convergence of sheaf diffusion, and a universal approximation theorem by which a network can learn any sheaf on a graph. What is missing is a description of what the learning mechanism does: which region of the sheaf space a training pipeline reaches, and whether different pipelines are biased towards different regions. From the decomposition we derive two diagnostics of neural sheaf diffusion, one per term: the conviction and the Forman profile. The conviction is an operational score of node importance: on a frozen trained network, removing the highest-conviction nodes is the most damaging intervention at every budget and in every perturbation mode, while removing the lowest-conviction ones costs less than removing arbitrary nodes of the same graph. The Forman profile tracks, layer by layer, how a learning mechanism navigates the sheaf space, and each of the three mechanisms we test leaves its own signature: normalized general sheaf learning converges to local alignment with the normalized graph Laplacian, unnormalized learning aligns with neither reference, and joint diffusion [29] reverses the role of normalization. Evaluated without normalization, the profile of the same learnt maps stays far from that of the identity sheaf, so we read the alignment as an inductive bias towards one region of the sheaf space.

Related work

Sheaves on directed and undirected graphs have recently been given a differential calculus [30], formalized for the Grothendieck topology and developed in the spirit of noncommutative geometry, where a Bochner Laplacian is defined as ∇∗∇\nabla^{\ast}\nabla for ∇\nabla the connection of a bundle over a graph. We work instead with cellular sheaves, hence over the Alexandrov topology, and our starting point is the decomposition of an existing sheaf Laplacian. A recent work also brings Forman curvature and sheaves together [31], building restriction maps as a function of the Forman curvature of the edges and using the resulting sheaf Laplacian for community detection; the direction there is the opposite of ours: we define a curvature from a cellular sheaf, while they use a graph curvature to define a particular sheaf. Finally, dynamical processes on connection Laplacians have received considerable attention lately [32, 33, 34, 35], with a focus on Kuramoto models, Turing patterns and network coherence, and our framework opens the possibility of carrying those results to the anisotropic setting while still controlling the balance of the system through holonomy. We note that these works use the term “matrix-weighted graph” to mean a connection Laplacian, whereas we reserve it for the sense of [25].

Curvature has also been studied on connection Laplacians independently of sheaves. Liu, Münch and Peyerimhoff [36] define a Bakry–Émery curvature for connection graphs and derive higher-order Buser inequalities from it, with Cheeger constants mixing the expansion of the underlying graph with the frustration index of the signature. This notion of curvature was moreover reformulated in [37]. Such curvatures are available on a connection Laplacian because it generates a random walk, with scalar transition rates. For a general sheaf Laplacian it is not clear how to obtain one, and that failure is exactly the Forman term, which measures how far the diagonal is from the sum of the magnitudes of the off-diagonal blocks. Sheaf Laplacians with vanishing Forman term are the Bochner matrices, and these, as we show in this work, do carry a random walk, so we believe a Bakry–Émery curvature can be built for them, and we leave this to future work.

Sheaf Neural Networks were introduced by Hansen and Gebhart [19] on a sheaf fixed in advance; Bodnar et al. [20] learn the sheaf from the data, and prove that a network can learn any sheaf on a graph. Several works have since studied the parametrization of the restriction maps, through connection Laplacians aligned with the data manifold [38], equivariant transport [39], or a diffusion process on the restriction maps themselves, run jointly with the one on the node features [29]. Others have extended the architecture, to features on SPD manifolds [40] and to message diffusion over flat vector bundles [41]. The sheaf formalism has also been used to generalize attention in graph neural networks [42]. On the theoretical side, oversmoothing has been related to a degeneration of the representation underlying the learnt sheaf [43]. On the other hand, Hernandez Caralt et al. [44] showed empirically that identity restriction maps perform similarly to learnt ones, which questions to what extent learning the sheaf matters. Finally, crucial features of graph neural networks such as over-squashing have been related to the curvature of the graph [45]. While we build a notion of Forman curvature for cellular sheaves, we do not pursue this direction, which would involve the Forman term of the sheaf Hodge Laplacian in degree 1; in § 6.4 we compute instead the Forman term of the graph sheaf Laplacian, in degree 0, which to avoid ambiguity we call Forman term and not curvature. Studying over-squashing in Sheaf Neural Networks from this curvature perspective is left for future work. We refer to § 6.2 and § 6.4 for a further discussion.

Organization of the paper

The paper is organized as follows. § 2 fixes notation and recalls cellular sheaves, signed graphs and Forman’s decomposition. § 3 introduces the Bochner decomposition for sheaf Laplacians, and § 4 and § 5 study its two terms in turn: within the first, § 4.2 proves the Cheeger inequalities and § 4.3 attaches the random walk. § 6 develops the dynamical reading and the applications to Sheaf Neural Networks. We conclude in § 7. Proofs deferred from the body are collected in Appendix § 10, each statement being restated before its proof, further properties of Bochner matrices are in Appendix § 12, and the experimental protocols with the additional material are in Appendices § 13 and § 14.

Background

This section fixes notation for cellular sheaves and their Laplacians, and recalls the facts on signed graphs and on Forman’s Bochner decomposition that the paper builds on.

Cellular sheaves on simplicial complexes

We follow [46, 47] for simplicial cochain complexes and [5, 6] for cellular sheaves. Let XX be a finite simplicial complex, XkX_k its set of kk-simplices and n:=∣X0∣n := |X_0|. We write σ≺τ\sigma\prec\tau for inclusion of simplices, with no restriction on the difference in dimension, so that the simplices of XX form the face poset; the words face and coface are reserved for the codimension-one case, the only one entering the formulas below. Fixing an orientation of each simplex, ϵστ∈{−1,0,+1}\epsilon_{\sigma\tau} \in\{-1,0,+1\} is the relative orientation of a codimension-one pair, and vanishes when σ\sigma is not a face of τ\tau.

Definition 2.1 (Cellular sheaf). A cellular sheaf F\mathcal{F} on XX assigns to every simplex σ\sigma a finite-dimensional real vector space F(σ)\mathcal{F}(\sigma), its stalk, and to every pair σ⊴τ\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau a linear restriction map Fσ⊴τ:F(σ)→F(τ)\mathcal{F}_{\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau}:\mathcal{F}(\sigma)\to\mathcal{F}(\tau), with Fσ⊴σ=id⁡F(σ)\mathcal{F}_{\sigma\trianglelefteq\sigma}=\operatorname{id}_{\mathcal{F}(\sigma)} and Fρ⊴τ=Fσ⊴τFρ⊴σ\mathcal{F}_{\rho\trianglelefteq\tau}=\mathcal{F}_{\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau}\mathcal{F}_{\rho\trianglelefteq\sigma} whenever ρ⊴σ⊴τ\rho\trianglelefteq\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau.

Equivalently, F\mathcal{F} is a functor from the face poset to finite-dimensional real vector spaces [5], and it is determined by the maps attached to faces. Throughout, every stalk has dimension dd. On Ck(X;F)=⨁σ∈XkF(σ)C^k(X;\mathcal{F})=\bigoplus_{\sigma\in X_k}\mathcal{F}(\sigma) the coboundary δk:Ck(X;F)→Ck+1(X;F)\delta_k:C^k(X;\mathcal{F})\to C^{k+1}(X;\mathcal{F}) is:

(δkc)τ=∑σ⊴τdim⁡σ=kϵστFσ⊴τcσ(1)(\delta_k c)_\tau=\sum_{\substack{\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau\\ \dim\sigma=k}}\epsilon_{\sigma\tau}\mathcal{F}_{\sigma\trianglelefteq\tau}c_\sigma \tag*{(1)}

it satisfies δk+1δk=0\delta_{k+1}\delta_k=0, and Hk(X;F):=ker⁡δk/im⁡δk−1\mathcal{H}^k(X;\mathcal{F}):=\ker\delta_k/\operatorname{im}\delta_{k-1} is the sheaf cohomology of F\mathcal{F}; the constant sheaf R\mathbb{R} recovers the simplicial cochain complex of XX. With the standard inner product on each Ck(X;F)C^k(X;\mathcal{F}) and δk∗\delta_k^* the adjoint of δk\delta_k, the Hodge sheaf Laplacian HkF=δk−1δk−1∗+δk∗δkH_k^{\mathcal{F}}=\delta_{k-1}\delta_{k-1}^*+\delta_k^*\delta_k is a positive semidefinite matrix with d×dd\times d blocks indexed by XkX_k, and ker⁡HkF≅Hk(X;F)\ker H_k^{\mathcal{F}}\cong\mathcal{H}^k(X;\mathcal{F}). We write ∂:=δ∗\partial:=\delta^* for the boundary operator, with the degree left implicit, so that ∂∗=δ\partial^*=\delta. At k=0k=0 we write LF:=H0F=δ0∗δ0L_{\mathcal{F}}:=H_0^{\mathcal{F}}=\delta_0^*\delta_0 for the graph sheaf Laplacian; on a graph G=(V,E)G=(V,E) its blocks are (LF)vv=∑e:v⊴eFv⊴eTFv⊴e(L_{\mathcal{F}})_{vv}=\sum_{e:v\trianglelefteq e}\mathcal{F}_{v\trianglelefteq e}^{\mathsf{T}}\mathcal{F}_{v\trianglelefteq e} and, on an edge e=(v,u)e=(v,u), (LF)vu=−Fv⊴eTFu⊴e(L_{\mathcal{F}})_{vu}=-\mathcal{F}_{v\trianglelefteq e}^{\mathsf{T}}\mathcal{F}_{u\trianglelefteq e}.

Two classes of graph sheaf Laplacians recur below. Taking Fv⊴e=wvuOv⊴e\mathcal{F}_{v\trianglelefteq e}=\sqrt{w_{vu}}O_{v\trianglelefteq e} with Ov⊴eO_{v\trianglelefteq e} orthogonal and wvu>0w_{vu}>0 gives off-diagonal blocks −wvuWvuT-w_{vu}W_{vu}^{\mathsf{T}}, with WvuT:=Ov⊴eTOu⊴e∈O(d)W_{vu}^{\mathsf{T}}:=O_{v\trianglelefteq e}^{\mathsf{T}}O_{u\trianglelefteq e}\in O(d): these are the connection Laplacians [22, 23], called bundle sheaves in Sheaf Neural Networks [19, 20]. Taking Fv⊴e=Mvu1/2\mathcal{F}_{v\trianglelefteq e}=M_{vu}^{1/2} with Mvu⪰0M_{vu}\succeq0 gives off-diagonal blocks −Mvu-M_{vu}, without rotation: these are the matrix-weighted Laplacians [25, 26]. With D:=blockdiag⁡((LF)vv)D:=\operatorname{blockdiag}((L_{\mathcal{F}})_{vv}) the degree matrix, the normalized sheaf Laplacian ΔF:=D−1/2LFD−1/2\Delta_{\mathcal{F}}:=D^{-1/2}L_{\mathcal{F}}D^{-1/2} has spectrum in [0,2][0,2] [13]. We work with unweighted sheaves: every weighted sheaf Laplacian, and in particular every normalized one, is the Laplacian of some unweighted sheaf [13], a fact Sections 3 and 6.4 use directly.

Signed graphs, balance and holonomy

A signed graph Γ=(V,E,W)\Gamma=(V,E,W) carries a symmetric weighted adjacency matrix WW whose entries may be negative [27]. With degrees dv:=∑u∣wvu∣d_v:=\sum_u\lvert w_{vu}\rvert, D:=diag⁡(dv)D:=\operatorname{diag}(d_v), and W=W+−W−W=W^+-W^- split into its nonnegative parts, the signed Laplacian is LΓ:=D−W=D−W++W−L_\Gamma:=D-W=D-W^++W^-, and its quadratic form is:

xTLΓx=∑vu∈E∣wvu∣(xv−sgn⁡(wvu)xu)2(2)x^{\mathsf{T}}L_\Gamma x=\sum_{vu\in E}\lvert w_{vu}\rvert\left(x_v-\operatorname{sgn}(w_{vu})x_u\right)^2 \tag*{(2)}

so LΓ⪰0L_\Gamma\succeq0. Unlike the unsigned case, the kernel may be trivial, and its dimension is a structural invariant [48], controlled by balance. A cycle is positive if it carries an even number of negative edges.

Definition 2.2 (Balance and antibalance). Γ\Gamma is balanced if every cycle is positive, and antibalanced if the signed graph obtained by reversing every edge sign is balanced.

Theorem 2.1 (Structure theorem for balance [49, 50]). Γ\Gamma is balanced if and only if there is a partition V=V1⊔V2V=V_1\sqcup V_2 such that every edge within V1V_1 or within V2V_2 is positive and every edge between V1V_1 and V2V_2 is negative. It is antibalanced if and only if the same holds with the two signs exchanged.

The partition is visible in the spectrum [49, 51, 52]. Writing 1V1\mathbb{1}_{V_1} for the indicator vector of V1V_1:

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