Object-Oriented Learning (OOL): Perception, Representation, and Reasoning

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Friday July 17, 2020, Virtual Workshop

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Hierarchical Relational Inference

Common-sense physical reasoning requires learning about the interactions of objects and their dynamics. The notion of an abstract object, however, encompasses a wide variety of physical objects that differ greatly in terms of the complex behaviors they support. To address this, we propose a novel approach to physical reasoning that models objects as hierarchies of parts that may locally behave separately, but also act more globally as a single whole. Unlike prior approaches, our method learns in an unsupervised fashion directly from raw visual images to discover objects, parts, and their relations. We demonstrate how it improves over a strong baseline at modeling synthetic and real-world physical dynamics.