Object-Centric Representation Learning

Overview

Object-centric representation learning asks how visual systems can represent a scene as separate entities, rather than as one undifferentiated image, so they can track objects, reason about relations, and predict what happens next. Common approaches use slot attention and reconstruction objectives, self-supervised feature grouping, or temporal and 3D models that separate persistent identity from changing appearance and motion. Researchers evaluate these representations on object discovery and video segmentation benchmarks such as CLEVR and MOVi, as well as compositional reasoning and robot manipulation tasks such as LIBERO. A central tension is that object structure can improve generalization and control under visual or compositional shifts, but slots may fragment or bind objects poorly, and dense pretrained features can be stronger when tasks are easier or training data is abundant.

Latest papers

CardsList

94 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 22% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. OrthoRF: Exploring Orthogonality in Object-Centric Representations

    Oct 26, 2026Despoina Touska, Bastiaan Onne Fagginger Auer, Alexandru Onose +6Object-Centric Representation LearningUnsupervised Visual Concept Discovery

  2. DynaSlots: Slot-Centric 3D Dynamics Pretraining for Robot Manipulation

    Oct 23, 2026Meng Li, Lijiang Chen, Qi Zhao +4Robot LearningRobot Dynamics Learning

  3. Slot-JEPA: Object-Structured Prediction Interfaces for Latent World Models

    Oct 20, 2026Peisong Wen, Qianqian Xu, Minye Lei +3Goal-Conditioned PlanningJoint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

  4. Beyond the Encoder: Object-Centric Representations Emerging from Segmentation Foundation Models

    Oct 13, 2026Michalis Pistos, Bartłomiej W. PapieżCancer Subtype ClassificationObject-Centric Representation Learning

  5. SlotAVS: Object-Centric Audio-Visual Segmentation via Bi-Modal Slot Attention

    Oct 11, 2026Arnav Sharma, Anand Mishra, Renu RameshanAudio-Visual UnderstandingSlot Attention

  6. MOSAIC: Multi-Scale Object-Centric Slot Adaptation with Image-Guided Prototype Conditioning for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

    Oct 9, 2026Liuqian Wang, Hanyu Xie, Rongzhen Zhao +6Remote Sensing Image Super-ResolutionObject-Centric Representation Learning

  7. LinSlot: Exploiting Linear Representation hypothesis for unsupervised attribute discovery from slot based object representation

    Oct 7, 2026Sanket Gandhi, Utkarsh Giri, Varun Subramaniam +2Disentangled Representation LearningUnsupervised Learning

  8. iSEE: Object Permanence Through Self-Supervision

    Oct 1, 2026Pramish Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool +1Visual Object TrackingObject-Centric Representation Learning

  9. World-as-Graph: Relational World Modeling Through Latent Space Graphs

    Sep 30, 2026Yaqi Yang, Shuo Huang, Yujin Huang +3Graph Structure LearningWorld Model Learning

  10. VidAct: Learning Manipulation from In-the-Wild Videos with Object-Centric 3D Awareness

    Sep 29, 2026Hang Li, Mingxin Zhang, Zihan Wu +9Object-Centric Representation LearningRobotic Manipulation

  11. Underwater C3-JEPA: An Object-Centric Cross-View World Model for ROV Salvage

    Sep 24, 2026Yuncong Yang, Jinlong Li, Yulong Xue +4World Models for RoboticsJoint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

  12. ParticleSplat: Self-supervised Object-centric Latent Particle Splatting

    Sep 16, 2026Lyuxing He, Daniel Guo, Elizabeth Terveen +33D Gaussian SplattingObject-Centric Representation Learning

  13. SlotDiT: Object-Centric Representations for Diffusion Transformers

    Sep 15, 2026Gjergj Plepi, Sven BehnkeDiffusion TransformerLatent Diffusion Models

  14. Does Attention-Guided Masking Really Help Object Discovery in Object-Centric Learning?

    Sep 14, 2026Youliang Tao, Yanhua Han, Bin Zhao +3Object-Centric Representation LearningSlot Attention

  15. GeoCo-SAVi: Geometry-Consistent Slot Attention for Explicitly Editable Object Representations

    Sep 6, 2026Haoxiang Huang, Zhekai Wang, Xiang Liu +6Object-Centric Representation LearningSlot Attention

  16. Object Concepts Emerge from Motion

    Sep 3, 2026Boshi Li, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaoyang Wu +3Object-Centric Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

  17. Weakly supervised concept Bottleneck Learning for Robust Two stage Object centric visual reasoning

    Aug 23, 2026Sparsh Tiwari, Gesina Schwalbe, Bettina FinzelConcept Bottleneck ModelsObject-Centric Representation Learning

  18. Semantic Slots for Video Object-Centric Learning

    Aug 21, 2026Khalil Sabri, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier +1Video Object-Centric LearningObject-Centric Representation Learning

  19. OpenBelief-Nav: Evidence-Preserving Object Memory for Open-Vocabulary Language-Guided Navigation

    Aug 14, 2026Dinh Tuan Nguyen, Anh Dao, Phuong Nam Dang +4Vision-Language NavigationOpen-Vocabulary Object Navigation

  20. Better Slots, Better Worlds: Representation Quality & Robustness in Object-Centric World Models

    Aug 12, 2026Shukrullo Nazirjonov, Sai Prasanna, Anna Manasyan +1World ModelsWorld Model-Based Planning

  21. Vision Meets WiFi: Physics-Grounded Estimation of Volumetric Mechanical Properties

    Aug 7, 2026Ali Bahri, Hongliang Li, Soufiane Lamghari +2Object-Centric Representation LearningMaterials Property Prediction

  22. SR-JEPA: Learning Predictive Latent State in 3D Scenes

    Aug 6, 2026Zihan Zhou, Qifu Wen, Xi ZengJoint-Embedding Predictive ArchitectureObject-Centric Representation Learning

  23. Slot2Text: Object-Centric Visual Tokenization for Efficient and Spatially Traceable Surgical MLLMs

    Aug 2, 2026Guiqiu Liao, Matjaz Jogan, Daniel A. HashimotoImage TokenizationHealthcare

  24. SSR: Similarity-Shift Refinement for Training-Free Object-Centric Masks

    Aug 2, 2026Xiaoqian Lu, Guangfu GuoGraph-Based Label PropagationImage Segmentation

  25. SAM3D-Guided Object-Centric Representation Alignment for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 28, 2026Zonghe Liu, Shanyuan Jie, Xiaoquan Sun +4Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationObject-Centric Representation Learning