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

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Friday July 17, 2020, Virtual Workshop

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Reconstruction Bottlenecks in Object-Centric Generative Models

Martin Engelcke, Oiwi Parker Jones, and Ingmar Posner
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A range of methods with suitable inductive biases exist to learn interpretable object-centric representations of images without supervision. However, these are largely restricted to visually simple images; robust object discovery in real-world sensory datasets remains elusive. To increase the understanding of such inductive biases, we empirically investigate the role of ``reconstruction bottlenecks'' for scene decomposition in GENESIS, a recent VAE-based model. We show such bottlenecks determine reconstruction and segmentation quality and critically influence model behaviour.