GROUPOID

Pre-alpha research prototype. This is an early-stage exploration of groupoid-based aggregation for federated learning on Riemannian manifolds. It is not a production federated learning system. See STATUS.md and LIMITATIONS.md.

Overview

GROUPOID explores using transport groupoids, cellular sheaves, and Riemannian geometry to aggregate model parameters across heterogeneous federated clients. The core idea: instead of naive Euclidean averaging (FedAvg), transport client parameters to a common frame via groupoid morphisms, check cohomological consistency, and compute the intrinsic Karcher mean on the parameter manifold.

Implemented and tested

These components have working implementations with property-based and integration tests:

• Karcher mean on Riemannian manifolds via geomstats (groupoid.manifold)
• Transport groupoid: morphism composition, inverse, composition associativity verified by Hypothesis (groupoid.groupoid)
• First cohomology H^1: holonomy-based obstruction detection on the cycle basis; coboundary vanishing and a multi-cycle independent holonomy-product reference tested; an incompletely specified cocycle (a cycle with a missing edge map) raises IncompleteCocycleError rather than reporting a partial-product false positive (groupoid.cohomology)
• Cellular sheaf: restriction maps with functoriality tested (groupoid.sheaf)
• Sheaf Laplacian: connection Laplacian L = delta^T delta; PSD and delta^T-delta equality verified on non-orthogonal restriction maps, plus spectral analysis, algebraic connectivity, and diffusion convergence tested (groupoid.laplacian)
• Federated aggregation pipeline: transport-aware aggregation with H^1 consistency checking, multi-round convergence tested (groupoid.aggregation)

Implemented, validated against ground truth, not yet integrated

These modules have unit tests that validate behavior against a known-correct reference, but are not yet wired into the main aggregation pipeline:

• Parallel transport: Schild's ladder and pole ladder (groupoid.transport). The pole ladder is validated against geomstats' analytic parallel transport on S^2 -- it matches in direction (cosine > 0.999) and magnitude. Schild's ladder is a coarser first-order approximation and is asserted as such. See LIMITATIONS.md for the convergence caveat.
• Persistent homology: Vietoris-Rips filtration for divergence tracking (groupoid.persistence). Unit-tested against point clouds of known topology: a circle's dominant 1-cycle (via maximum persistence), two-cluster component counting (betti_0 == 2 at a finite filtration), and a translation-invariant bottleneck distance. The persistence diagram retains a homology-dimension label, and track_divergence compares H0 against H0 only (it does not pool features across dimensions); this is verified against an independent minimum-spanning-tree reconstruction of the H0 diagram. The Betti numbers are degenerate under the default thresh=inf filtration; see LIMITATIONS.md.

Implemented, smoke-tested, not yet integrated

This module has implementation with smoke-test coverage only -- the tests check coarse sanity (steps stay on the manifold), not core correctness -- and it is not yet wired into the main aggregation pipeline:

• Riemannian optimizers: SGD and Adam with exponential map retraction; smoke-tested to stay on the manifold after a step, with the curvature-adaptive learning rate covered for both its damping and fallback branches. Core descent/convergence behavior is not validated (groupoid.optimizer)

Status

Pre-alpha. See STATUS.md for details.

Related work / why not just use X?

GROUPOID sits at the intersection of three existing toolchains and is not a replacement for any of them. It is an exploratory prototype of one specific idea -- transport-groupoid aggregation with cohomological consistency checking -- not a federated learning framework.

• Flower / FedML / TensorFlow Federated -- mature federated learning frameworks providing the client/server communication, orchestration, and real training loops that GROUPOID deliberately does not implement (see LIMITATIONS.md: "Not a federated learning framework"). GROUPOID is about the aggregation operator, not the FL plumbing; in principle a transport-aware aggregator like this one would be dropped into such a framework, not used instead of it.
• geomstats / pymanopt -- Riemannian-geometry libraries. GROUPOID uses geomstats for the manifold primitives (the Karcher mean delegates to geomstats FrechetMean). What GROUPOID adds on top is the transport groupoid, the H^1 holonomy/consistency check, and the cellular-sheaf Laplacian wiring -- not the manifold geometry itself.
• Cellular-sheaf spectral methods (the sheaf-Laplacian line of work, e.g. Hansen and Ghrist's spectral theory of cellular sheaves, and sheaf neural networks) -- GROUPOID's sheaf Laplacian follows this line and is the geometric machinery for detecting inconsistency across clients. The contribution here is applying it to the federated-aggregation setting, not the sheaf-Laplacian construction in the abstract.

In short: use Flower/FedML/TFF for the FL system, use geomstats/pymanopt for manifold math; GROUPOID is a research prototype testing whether combining a transport groupoid with sheaf-cohomological consistency yields a better aggregation operator than Euclidean FedAvg. That hypothesis is not yet validated (see STATUS.md).

Installation

Requires Python 3.10, 3.11, or 3.12. Python 3.13+ is not supported: the numpy<2.0 / scipy<1.14 pins (needed for geomstats compatibility, see LIMITATIONS.md) have no wheels there, so pip will refuse with a Requires-Python message rather than attempt a source build.

From source (not published on PyPI):

git clone https://github.com/smaniches/GROUPOID.git
cd GROUPOID
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quick example

import networkx as nx
import numpy as np
from geomstats.geometry.hypersphere import Hypersphere
from groupoid import TransportGroupoidAggregator

manifold = Hypersphere(dim=2)
graph = nx.DiGraph([("A", "B"), ("A", "C")])

aggregator = TransportGroupoidAggregator(
    manifold=manifold, graph=graph, base_node="A"
)

# Register rotation matrices as transport maps
theta = np.pi / 6
R = np.array([
    [np.cos(theta), -np.sin(theta), 0],
    [np.sin(theta),  np.cos(theta), 0],
    [0, 0, 1],
])
aggregator.register_transport("A", "B", R)
aggregator.register_transport("A", "C", R.T)

client_params = {
    "A": np.array([0.0, 0.0, 1.0]),
    "B": np.array([0.1, 0.0, 0.995]),
    "C": np.array([-0.1, 0.0, 0.995]),
}
client_params = {k: v / np.linalg.norm(v) for k, v in client_params.items()}

result = aggregator.aggregate(client_params)
print(f"H^1 = {result.h1_norm:.2e} (consistent: {result.is_consistent})")

Running tests

pytest tests/ -v

The suite reaches 100% line and branch coverage of the groupoid package on Python 3.10-3.12, enforced in CI:

pytest tests/ --cov=groupoid --cov-branch --cov-fail-under=100

Coverage measures which lines run, not whether behavior is correct. See STATUS.md for the per-component validation depth, which coverage alone does not capture.

Documentation

smaniches.github.io/GROUPOID

License

Copyright 2026 TOPOLOGICA LLC. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.