Understanding dynamics from visual observations is a challenging problem that requires disentangling individual objects from the scene and learning their interactions. While recent object-centric models can successfully decompose a scene into objects, modeling their dynamics effectively still remains a challenge. We address this problem by introducing SlotFormer -- a Transformer-based autoregressive model operating on learned object-centric representations. Given a video clip, our approach reasons over object features to model spatio-temporal relationships and predicts accurate future object states. In this paper, we successfully apply SlotFormer to perform video prediction on datasets with complex object interactions. Moreover, the unsupervised SlotFormer's dynamics model can be used to improve the performance on supervised downstream tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), and goal-conditioned planning. Compared to past works on dynamics modeling, our method achieves significantly better long-term synthesis of object dynamics, while retaining high quality visual generation. Besides, SlotFormer enables VQA models to reason about the future without object-level labels, even outperforming counterparts that use ground-truth annotations. Finally, we show its ability to serve as a world model for model-based planning, which is competitive with methods designed specifically for such tasks.
We present Language-mediated, Object-centric Representation Learning (LORL), a paradigm for learning disentangled, object-centric scene representations from vision and language. LORL builds upon recent advances in unsupervised object discovery and segmentation, notably MONet and Slot Attention. While these algorithms learn an object-centric representation just by reconstructing the input image, LORL enables them to further learn to associate the learned representations to concepts, i.e., words for object categories, properties, and spatial relationships, from language input. These object-centr…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Meta AI
Image captioning is a longstanding problem in the field of computer vision and natural language processing. To date, researchers have produced impressive state-of-the-art performance in the age of deep learning. Most of these state-of-the-art, however, requires large volume of annotated image-caption pairs in order to train their models. When given an image dataset of interests, practitioner needs to annotate the caption for each image in the training set and this process needs to happen for each newly collected image dataset. In this paper, we explore the task of unsupervised image captioning…
CLIP-Guided Adaptable Self-Supervised Learning for Human-Centric Visual Tasks
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（智能信息处理重点实验室，计算技术研究所（ICT），中国科学院（CAS）及中国科学院大学）
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙工业大学）；LIGM, Ecole des Ponts, Univ Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学桥路学院LIGM实验室）；Tooploox（Tooploox公司）；IDEAS NCBR（IDEAS国家研究与发展中心）；Jagiellonian University of Cracow（克拉科夫雅盖隆大学）
Recent advances in visual representation learning allowed to build an abundance of powerful off-the-shelf features that are ready-to-use for numerous downstream tasks. This work aims to assess how well these features preserve information about the objects, such as their spatial location, their visual properties and their relative relationships. We propose to do so by evaluating them in the context of visual reasoning, where multiple objects with complex relationships and different attributes are at play. More specifically, we introduce a protocol to evaluate visual representations for the task…
Object-Centric Temporal Consistency via Conditional Autoregressive Inductive Biases
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Mila, University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学米拉研究所）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Unsupervised object-centric learning aims to represent the modular, compositional, and causal structure of a scene as a set of object representations and thereby promises to resolve many critical limitations of traditional single-vector representations such as poor systematic generalization. Although there have been many remarkable advances in recent years, one of the most critical problems in this direction has been that previous methods work only with simple and synthetic scenes but not with complex and naturalistic images or videos. In this paper, we propose STEVE, an unsupervised model for…
We tackle the problem of object-centric learning on point clouds, which is crucial for high-level relational reasoning and scalable machine intelligence. In particular, we introduce a framework, SPAIR3D, to factorize a 3D point cloud into a spatial mixture model where each component corresponds to one object. To model the spatial mixture model on point clouds, we derive the Chamfer Mixture Loss, which fits naturally into our variational training pipeline. Moreover, we adopt an object-specification scheme that describes each object's location relative to its local voxel grid cell. Such a scheme…
Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Humans naturally decompose their environment into entities at the appropriate level of abstraction to act in the world. Allowing machine learning algorithms to derive this decomposition in an unsupervised way has become an important line of research. However, current methods are restricted to simulated data or require additional information in the form of motion or depth in order to successfully discover objects. In this work, we overcome this limitation by showing that reconstructing features from models trained in a self-supervised manner is a sufficient training signal for object-centric re…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods assume that they have test ground truths, i.e., whether individual test samples are in-distribution (IND) or OOD. However, in the real world, we do not always have such ground truths, and thus do not know which sample is correctly detected and cannot compute the metric like AUROC to evaluate the performance of different OOD detection methods. In this paper, we are the first to introduce the unsupervised evaluation problem in OOD detection, which aims to evaluate OOD detection methods in real-world changing environments without OOD labels. We propose …
A natural approach to generative modeling of videos is to represent them as a composition of moving objects. Recent works model a set of 2D sprites over a slowly-varying background, but without considering the underlying 3D scene that gives rise to them. We instead propose to model a video as the view seen while moving through a scene with multiple 3D objects and a 3D background. Our model is trained from monocular videos without any supervision, yet learns to generate coherent 3D scenes containing several moving objects. We conduct detailed experiments on two datasets, going beyond the visual…
HUNTER: Unsupervised Human-centric 3D Detection via Transferring Knowledge from Synthetic Instances to Real Scenes
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Innovation Academy for Microsatellites, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微小卫星创新研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The ability to decompose complex natural scenes into meaningful object-centric abstractions lies at the core of human perception and reasoning. In the recent culmination of unsupervised object-centric learning, the Slot-Attention module has played an important role with its simple yet effective design and fostered many powerful variants. These methods, however, have been exceedingly difficult to train without supervision and are ambiguous in the notion of object, especially for complex natural scenes. In this paper, we propose to address these issues by investigating the potential of learnable…
School of Medical Imaging, Xuzhou Medical University（徐州医科大学医学影像学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
With the widespread success of deep learning in biomedical image segmentation, domain shift becomes a critical and challenging problem, as the gap between two domains can severely affect model performance when deployed to unseen data with heterogeneous features. To alleviate this problem, we present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation network, for generalizing models learned from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain for cross-modality biomedical image segmentation. Specifically, our approach consists of two key modules, a conditional domain discriminator~(CDD) and a cate…
Future Slot Prediction for Unsupervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video
PCASO Laboratory, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania（匹兹堡大学外科实验室、外科系、匹兹堡大学）；Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania（计算机与信息科学系、匹兹堡大学）
VideoPCDNet: Video Parsing and Prediction with Phase Correlation Networks
Autonomous Intelligent Systems group, University of Bonn, Germany（bonn大学自主智能系统小组）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；Center for Robotics, University of Bonn, Germany（bonn大学机器人中心）
Mila-Quebec AI Institute, Canada（魁北克AI研究所）；Samsung - SAIT AI Lab, Montreal, Canada（三星SAIT人工智能实验室）；University of Montreal, Canada（蒙特利尔大学）；Institute of Science and Technology Austria（奥地利科学与技术研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Supervised (pre-)training currently yields state-of-the-art performance for representation learning for visual recognition, yet it comes at the cost of (1) intensive manual annotations and (2) an inherent restriction in the scope of data relevant for learning. In this work, we explore unsupervised feature learning from unlabeled video. We introduce a novel object-centric approach to temporal coherence that encourages similar representations to be learned for object-like regions segmented from nearby frames. Our framework relies on a Siamese-triplet network to train a deep convolutional neural …
Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to obtain high-level semantic representation on low-level visual features without manual annotations. Most existing methods are bottom-up approaches that try to group pixels into regions based on their visual cues or certain predefined rules. As a result, it is difficult for these bottom-up approaches to generate fine-grained semantic segmentation when coming to complicated scenes with multiple objects and some objects sharing similar visual appearance. In contrast, we propose the first top-down unsupervised semantic segmentation framework for fine-grain…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Bosch Center for AI（博世人工智能中心）
Object-centric representations form the basis of human perception, and enable us to reason about the world and to systematically generalize to new settings. Currently, most works on unsupervised object discovery focus on slot-based approaches, which explicitly separate the latent representations of individual objects. While the result is easily interpretable, it usually requires the design of involved architectures. In contrast to this, we propose a comparatively simple approach - the Complex AutoEncoder (CAE) - that creates distributed object-centric representations. Following a coding scheme…
FORLA: Federated Object-centric Representation Learning with Slot Attention
PCASO Laboratory, Dept. of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学外科部PCASO实验室）；Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学计算机与信息科学系）
We introduce a new architecture for unsupervised object-centric representation learning and multi-object detection and segmentation, which uses a translation-equivariant attention mechanism to predict the coordinates of the objects present in the scene and to associate a feature vector to each object. A transformer encoder handles occlusions and redundant detections, and a convolutional autoencoder is in charge of background reconstruction. We show that this architecture significantly outperforms the state of the art on complex synthetic benchmarks.
