Data-driven Discovery of Lie Symmetries and First Integrals with Latent ODEs

Matt L. Wiemman, Peter Melchior

We present LatentLieODE, a novel neural ODE method to discover linear Lie symmetries and first integrals of the learned dynamics from timeseries observations such as video inputs. It starts with an autoencoder, which learns a low dimensional representation of the observed system and then maps trajectories to decorrelated latent coordinates $z \in \mathbb{R}^d$. A bank of linear infinitesimal generators $\mathbf{A}_k \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ is fitted jointly against a differentiable Lie-bracket residual $\mathbf{J}_f(z)\mathbf{A}z - \mathbf{A} f(z)$, while an MLP optimises the latent ODE $f(z) = \mathrm{d}z/\mathrm{d}t$ to reconstruct the observation-space timeseries. After suitable generators and $f$ are found, we fit a third network $H_φ$ to generate the first integral of the system. Across six benchmark systems (harmonic oscillator, simple and twin pendulums, Lotka-Volterra, pixel pendulum, sphere geodesics) we find each system's relevant symmetries, and the discovered invariants match ground-truth conserved quantities at $|ρ| \geq 0.978$. On the sphere, the pipeline recovers a non-abelian $\mathfrak{so}(3)$, certified by the negative-definite Killing form of its recovered…