Designing Affine-Invariant Neural Networks for Photometric Corruption Robustness and Generalization

Mounir Messaoudi, Quentin Rapilly, Sébastien Herbreteau, Anaïs Badoual, Charles Kervrann

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Standard Convolutional Neural Networks are notoriously sensitive to photometric variations, a critical flaw that data augmentation only partially mitigates without offering formal guarantees. We introduce the Scale-Equivariant Shift-Invariant (SEqSI) model, a novel architecture that achieves intensity scale equivariance and intensity shift invariance by design, enabling full invariance to global intensity affine transformations with appropriate post-processing. By strategically prepending a single shift-invariant layer to a scale-equivariant backbone, SEqSI provides these formal guarantees while remaining fully compatible with common components like ReLU. We benchmark SEqSI against Standard, Scale-Equivariant (SEq), and Affine-Equivariant (AffEq) models on 2D and 3D image-classification and object-localization tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that SEqSI architectural properties provide certified robustness to affine intensity transformations and enhances generalization across non-affine corruptions and domain shifts in challenging real-world applications like biological image analysis. This work establishes SEqSI as a practical and principled approach for building photometrically robust models without major trade-offs.