Hodge Spectral Surrogates for Topology-Constrained Optimization

Abstract

Topological information is widely used in data analysis, network design, and machine learning, and topological constraints naturally arise when optimizing or generating objects with prescribed homological structure. However, directly controlling Betti numbers and persistent homology is difficult because they are discrete and combinatorial. We propose a differentiable framework for topology-constrained optimization based on Hodge-spectral relaxations of homological constraints and low-pass spectral filters. From soft graphs and soft clique complexes, we construct Hodge-Laplacian-type spectral relaxations that unify graph clique complexes and Vietoris--Rips filtrations of point clouds. In the hard limit, the penalty-regularized ambient operator recovers the ordinary Hodge Laplacian on the active subcomplex, while in the soft regime it serves as a differentiable low-frequency spectral surrogate. Homological information is represented by zero and near-zero modes, and differentiable topological objectives are defined using heat filters, resolvent filters, and polynomial Laplacian moments. For point clouds, we show that the proposed Hodge spectral-filter losses yield more spatially distributed gradients, smoother scale-normalized behavior under persistence-pairing changes, and geometry-aware update directions than persistent-homology-based losses. For graph clique complexes, Laplacian moments control normalized first-Betti-type quantities and can be combined with ordinary graph-feature objectives. We also discuss connections to trace-based normalized Betti-number estimation, polynomial spectral methods, and possible quantum trace estimation.