Latent Mixture of Symmetries for Sample-Efficient Dynamic Learning

Abstract

Learning dynamics is essential for model-based control and Reinforcement Learning in engineering systems, such as robotics and power systems. However, limited system measurements, such as those from low-resolution sensors, demand sample-efficient learning. Symmetry provides a powerful inductive bias by characterizing equivariant relations in system states to improve sample efficiency. While recent methods attempt to discover symmetries from data, they typically assume a single global symmetry group and treat symmetry discovery and dynamic learning as separate tasks, leading to limited expressiveness and error accumulation. In this paper, we propose the Latent Mixture of Symmetries (Latent MoS), an expressive model that captures a mixture of symmetry-governed latent factors from complex dynamical measurements. Latent MoS focuses on dynamic learning while locally and provably preserving the underlying symmetric transformations. To further capture long-term equivariance, we introduce a hierarchical architecture that stacks MoS blocks. Numerical experiments in diverse physical systems demonstrate that Latent MoS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in interpolation and extrapolation tasks while offering interpretable latent representations suitable for future geometric and safety-critical analyses.