Object-Centric Representation Learning

This paper studies the problem of learning disentangled representations of objects and their attributes from raw, unstructured image data. Slot-based methods have shown considerable success in unsupervised learning of object representations from images. Block-slot attention-based methods extend this framework to attribute representations by assuming a uniform factorization of object representations into attributes, which may be suboptimal and consequently limit the quality of the learned representations. We therefore investigate a framework for jointly discovering object and attribute representations. Our key contribution is leveraging the Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH), which postulates that composable concepts can be represented as linearly additive subspaces in slot representations. Based on this insight, we propose a probabilistic model connecting images, slots (objects), and blocks (attributes). We present an architecture that leverages block attention to connect attribute representations to slots and incorporates LRH in both object and attribute representation spaces. This architecture effectively optimizes the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the proposed graphical model. Our experiments demonstrate (i) effective discovery of disentangled object and attribute representations, (ii) empirical evidence for LRH in slot space, and (iii) the ability to perform image editing owing to the disentangled and interpretable nature of the learned representations. Our experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate improvements in DCI scores over state-of-the-art methods.

Object permanence, keeping track of an object's identity and position while it is occluded, is central to video representations that track, predict and plan. Trackers that achieve it learn from boxes, track identities and visibility labels. On the other hand, self-supervised object-centric methods discover objects without labels: through slot attention, it represents a video as slots that bind to objects and follow them across frames. However, these slots are lost under occlusion, making the desired permanence impossible. Reasoning permanence is a hard problem because it requires to detect when an object becomes occluded, re-identify when object reappears, and keep the object's hidden position continuous, using reapperance as the only learning cue. To address this, we propose iSEE, a novel framework that offers all three aforementioned requirements, without any labels whatsoever. We built iSEE using the following three proposed components: (i) Object evidence modelling: a slot's attention, compared with its own past, reveals when its object is hidden. (ii) Appearance-position separation: two slot streams let the appearance be held for re-identification while the position keeps changing. (iii) Permanence from reappearance: a walker follows the hidden object's position, trained only on where the object reappears. On LA-CATER static, iSEE returns a reappearing object to its own slot after 86% of occlusions, against 32% for SlotContrast, and localises it while hidden within 4.1 mAP of the label-trained SoTA RAM. The two streams also allow downstream planning, with the position stream as the action of a world model. Project page: https://insait-institute.github.io/iSEE/

World models aim to learn representations of real-world environments and predict their future evolution. Recent object-centric world models have made expressive progress by representing visual scenes as sets of object-level latent states, but object-object relations are often captured only implicitly, which limits explicit relational and temporal structure modeling and object-centric dynamic memory modeling. To address such challenges, we propose World-As-Graph (WAG), a graph-based object-centric world model that introduces relational inductive bias into JEPA-style predictive representation learning. The proposed WAG contains two main modules: (1) Relation-aware structure induction, which constructs time-varying latent graphs from object-centric slots and designs relation-aware object masking policies to guide relational object representation learning in latent space; (2) Object-centric memory transition, which maintains and updates object-level dynamic states by combining relational information from neighboring objects with historical memory, enabling effective autoregressive future prediction. Extensive experiments on both visual reasoning and robotic manipulation tasks could demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed WAG.

Video demonstrations offer a scalable alternative to costly robot data for learning manipulation, yet existing reconstruction-based approaches often rely on constrained camera viewpoints or human-to-robot retargeting, while the reconstructed trajectories are difficult to adapt to new objects configurations without distorting the trajectory shape. Another key limitation is that the resulting policies often lack precise object-level 3D geometry awareness, limiting object grounding and object shape awareness critical for precise manipulation. To bridge these gaps, we propose VidAct, an efficient video-to-robot framework that learns object-centric, 3D-aware manipulation policies from a single monocular video per task and enables zero-shot real-world deployment. VidAct consists of three key components. First, VidAct reconstructs object meshes and motion from arbitrary demo videos and canonicalizes the motion in the static object frame, avoiding embodiment-specific retargeting and accommodating diverse camera viewpoints. Second, VidAct employ residual trajectory transfer for adapting the reconstructed motion to novel object configurations while preserving its motion shape. Finally, as the key policy-learning component, VidAct predicts simulation-provided privileged complete-object point clouds at each frame as an auxiliary task while retaining RGB-only deployment, providing dense object-centric supervision over both object pose and 3D geometry. Experiments on human, robot, generated, and internet videos demonstrate broad video applicability and zero-shot deployment. Per-frame complete-object 3D supervision improves policy generalization and sim-to-real success, while residual trajectory transfer enables reliable trajectory adaptation with better shape preservation.

We present Underwater C$^{3}$-JEPA (cross-view, control-conditioned, context-extended), an object-centric multi-view predictive world model for near-field heavy-load underwater ROV salvage. Without contact sensors, it predicts in latent space how the task-object state evolves through contact interaction and under the hydrodynamic lag of the vehicle, from synchronized multi-view RGB observations and vehicle control signals. C$^{3}$-JEPA encodes multi-camera observations into task-object and context tokens, fuses cross-camera evidence through held-out-view attention, and directly predicts future states conditioned on control. Weak binding anchors the target and gripper at low annotation cost, while SIGReg sharpens the geometric representation. Experiments show that the learned representation transfers substantially more task-relevant information to downstream probes than a reconstruction-free latent baseline, while keeping the predictor lightweight. The resulting predictive interface supports model-predictive-control (MPC) candidate evaluation and imagined-rollout behavior-agent training. Validation on real underwater video shows the same architecture recovering a withheld camera's object state and staying ahead of persistence, so the recipe transfers beyond simulation.

Long-horizon manipulation often requires reasoning about state absent from the current view, such as a vanished object's location, temporal identity, or the contents of a shuffled container. We present OCC4M ("Occam"), an object-centric 4D memory that maintains persistent tracks in a shared world frame and explicitly represents temporal, motion, and containment relations. A vision-language model (VLM) queries this structured memory to select actionable targets for history-free low-level execution. Across seven simulation conditions and 350 episodes, OCC4M achieves 96.6% memory success and 88.9% end-to-end success, versus 54.6% and 57.7% for FrameSamp, a raw-history VLM baseline using Gemini 3.7 Flash with the complete observation history and the same executor. In a controlled viewpoint-transfer test, OCC4M maintains 100% memory and 98% end-to-end success after a viewpoint change, while full-history FrameSamp falls to near-zero success. On 20 fixed-camera Franka episodes, OCC4M reaches 85% joint memory accuracy, versus at most 30% for FrameSamp across context sizes from $K=16$ to the complete history, and completes 45% of full two-stage tasks. These results support explicit object-centric memory for persistent spatiotemporal reasoning in long-horizon manipulation. Qualitative videos are available at https://occ4m-sup.github.io/occ4m-supplementary/.

We present ParticleSplat, a self-supervised object-centric learning method that decomposes scenes into a set of latent ''particles'' representing semantic entities through feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, which represents images as a set of particles with attributes such as position, scale, and visual appearance, we address a key limitation of DLP: its inherently 2D nature, which prevents explicit 3D spatial and geometric reasoning that are critical for downstream tasks such as robotic manipulation. Leveraging the structural similarity between latent particles and 3D Gaussian primitives, we introduce a 3D latent particle space trained with a novel view synthesis objective. Our model jointly encodes multiple views with camera poses into a shared 3D object-centric latent space, then transforms particles into particle-aligned 3D Gaussians whose composition reconstructs the full scene. On simulated and real-world datasets, we show that this formulation inherently learns object masks without supervision and supports controllable 3D scene editing, such as moving objects by modifying particles in the latent space. We further establish that the learned 3D representation improves downstream performance on robotic manipulation tasks.

Text-conditioned latent diffusion models perform strongly in video generation and are promising backbones for robotic applications. However, existing approaches rely on pixel-level or VAE-based latent representations that lack explicit semantic structure, leaving the impact of the representation space largely unexplored. Slot-based object-centric representations offer a structured alternative by decomposing scenes into object-level latents, or slots. While they have shown success in dynamics modeling and planning, they have not yet been explored for diffusion-based generative modeling. We introduce SlotDiT, a text-guided Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that operates in a slot-based latent space. Given a reference image and a language instruction, SlotDiT decomposes the scene into object-centric slots representing individual entities. Conditioned on the instruction and observed scene context, the model autoregressively denoises future slot trajectories to predict scene dynamics. To systematically investigate latent-space design for diffusion transformers, we compare slot-based representations against VAE-based and semantics-aligned alternatives within a unified DiT framework. Our experiments show that using slots as DiT latents yields competitive video generation quality while consistently improving task-completion rates across four robotic datasets. Furthermore, their compact representation provides a computationally efficient alternative to VAE-based and semantics-aligned latent spaces. Overall, our results demonstrate that object-centric structure is a powerful inductive bias for diffusion-based generative modeling in robotic environments. The project page is available at https://slot-dit.github.io/.

Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aims to decompose images into objects without human annotations. A major family of mainstream methods uses Slot Attention to aggregate image features into object-level representations and then from them reconstructs masked image content, i.e., Random Masking (RM), to provide self-supervision. The recent method DIAS simply masks image patches at uniform randomness yet achieves competitive object discovery accuracy. Since attention during aggregation already possesses object discovery ability, we explore using it to develop a better image patch masking strategy, i.e., Attention Guided Masking (AGM), thereby providing better self-supervision. Results on six recognized datasets show that AGM does not always outperform RM. Under unconditional slot initialization, AGM substantially improves background segmentation on datasets with realistic textures (COCO and VOC); Regardless of conditional or unconditional slot initialization and across datasets, foreground object discovery remains comparable or decreases. We suggest peer researchers in the OCL community that attempts to exploit internal attention semantics to improve OCL with masked decoding are risky. Our source code, model checkpoints and evaluation logs is available on https://github.com/und-entropy/Does-Attention-Guided-Masking-Really-Help-Object-Discovery-in-Object-Centric-Learning-.

Learning world models from offline trajectories enables agents to accomplish different tasks through planning. Object-centric (OC) representations, which decompose a scene into a set of slots that bind to its objects, have been proposed as an inductive bias for world models that are more sample-efficient and generalize better. Yet prior object-centric world models (OCWMs) take the slot encoder as given and evaluate only in-distribution, leaving open whether the object-centric bias actually delivers for planning and what within the OCWM drives it. We conduct a controlled study of OCWMs for visual model-predictive control along two axes: object-centric representation quality and generalization under distribution shift relative to scene-centric models. We find that (i) planning success correlates positively with unsupervised slot-quality metrics (FG-ARI, mBO), though the gains saturate at high slot quality; (ii) with well-bound slots, the auxiliary proprioception inputs and masking inductive bias that prior methods relied on become unnecessary; and (iii) under unseen distribution shifts, the OCWM with well-bound slots is more robust overall than the end-to-end trained scene-centric LeWM, while DINO-WM, built on similar frozen pretrained features, remains competitive -- pointing to pretrained features as a key contributor to robustness.

Estimating volumetric mechanical properties, including Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, and density at each voxel, is intrinsically ambiguous from vision alone, as visually similar objects may have substantially different material compositions and physical behavior. Existing approaches predict these properties independently across voxels, overlooking the piecewise-constant material structure of real objects and producing noisy or inconsistent estimates for voxels that share the same material, while lacking an explicit mechanism to resolve visual ambiguity. We introduce ViWi (Vision Meets WiFi), an object-centric framework for volumetric mechanical-property estimation. ViWi represents each object using a compact set of material slots that aggregate evidence from voxels with a shared material identity and produce coherent slot-level property predictions. To complement visual appearance, ViWi incorporates a compact RF descriptor generated through WiFi-band electromagnetic simulation using permittivity and conductivity. The RF descriptor conditions the material slots with global composition cues that may be unavailable from images, while visual features preserve voxel-level spatial localization. On GVM, ViWi improves over the prior state of the art on four of six per-voxel metrics, while its vision-only variant improves all reported mass-estimation metrics on ABO-500. These results demonstrate that combining object-centric material structure with complementary RF evidence enables more accurate and physically coherent volumetric property estimation beyond what is possible from visual appearance alone.

Joint-embedding predictive architectures learn by predicting latent representations of missing observations, yet many masked JEPAs are evaluated primarily through the encoders they produce. We ask what a trained predictive pathway itself infers when an entire entity is absent from a native 3D scene. We introduce SR-JEPA, a point-native JEPA for scene-scale point clouds whose original frozen predictive pathway can be queried at a supplied location. At evaluation, every point of one object is removed before encoding and replaced by the same shape-free 32-point query at its centroid. Training uses only self-contained 3D EMA targets: no reconstruction, semantic labels, language, or lifted 2D features. On 5,953 held-out ARKitScenes objects, the imputed latent reaches 43.13% semantic-identity macro accuracy, 22.18 points above the strongest floor. Randomizing the prediction path removes 9.78 points, while substituting matched donor context removes 21.98 points. On 8,570 Sr3D support pairs, the full latent reaches 41.15 AP; identity decoded from the missing-object latent, combined with anchor identity and geometry, reaches 39.37 AP, leaving an unresolved 1.78-point residual. These results reveal a queryable, compositional 3D predictive state: the model completes context-dependent entity content, which downstream computation combines with metric geometry.

Object-centric models often produce fragmented masks, boundary leakage, and incorrect region merging. We introduce Similarity-Shift Refinement (SSR), a training-free post-hoc method for improving object-centric masks with a frozen self-supervised Vision Transformer. SSR measures changes in pairwise patch similarity before and after self-attention value aggregation, retains positively strengthened relations, and constructs a sparse affinity graph. This graph propagates the initial soft slot assignments in a single refinement step, without retraining or modifying either model. Across natural-image, synthetic-video, and real-world-video benchmarks, SSR improves all-pixel Adjusted Rand Index in all 24 evaluated model-dataset combinations, with an average gain of 8.5 percentage points. Ablations show that value-space similarity shifts outperform query- and key-space variants as well as static Transformer affinities. However, texture-dense scenes may cause visually similar regions to be over-grouped. Overall, SSR provides a simple and transferable signal for training-free object-centric mask refinement.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general robot manipulation, but most existing models rely on 2D visual-language backbones and lack fine-grained 3D understanding of target objects, especially under occlusion, pose variation, scale changes, and precise spatial interaction. We propose an object-centric 3D representation alignment framework built upon $π_0$, using SAM3D as a frozen 3D teacher to provide target-object 3D priors during training. Specifically, we localize task-relevant objects with object recognition models, generate corresponding object masks, and use SAM3D to extract dense object-level 3D representations, which are aligned with intermediate visual features of $π_0$. This enables the policy to internalize target-object 3D information while preserving the original RGB-language-to-action inference pipeline without requiring depth, point clouds, masks, SAM3D, or additional 3D modules at test time. Simulation experiments show consistent improvements, achieving 99.1% on LIBERO and an average length of 4.11 on CALVIN. Real-world experiments further demonstrate that our method is particularly effective in long-horizon manipulation scenarios where the robot must focus on different target objects across multiple subtasks.

Object-centric learning aims to represent scenes as objects whose properties can be reused in new combinations. Existing evaluations usually score segmentation, single-image factor prediction, or downstream accuracy, but these tests do not directly ask whether a per-object representation behaves correctly under a controlled semantic edit. We introduce EditCLEVR, a paired-scene intervention benchmark in which each example contains a before/after pair of CLEVR-style renders with the same object indices and scene layout, and either exactly one known attribute change on one known object or a no-edit re-render for drift measurement. The protocol includes probe-free diagnostics for representation-change localization and stability, together with probe-decoded semantic faithfulness metrics that test whether the predicted scene change matches the intended intervention across in-distribution and compositional out-of-distribution (OOD) suites, allowing code-space movement and decoded object-attribute correctness to be evaluated separately. We introduce the semantic metric Scene-Graph Intervention Accuracy (SGIA), which requires the full after-scene prediction to be correct and the only predicted before-to-after semantic change to be the intended object-factor edit. We also establish Delta-SGIA as a companion diagnostic that checks the single-site change pattern without requiring the full after-scene graph to be correct. Baseline evaluations on ground-truth-mask backbones, learned-slot models, SAM 2 + frozen-ViT models, and one mask-feature hybrid indicate that CoGenT-OOD-core degradation can persist under ground-truth instance masks, that mask source accounts for part but not all of native performance, and that locality or stability alone can overstate semantic faithfulness. Code is available at https://github.com/torux-bughunter/EditCLEVR.

Deploying object-centric models for real-world scene understanding typically requires complex pipelines to achieve both robust scene decomposition and high-fidelity generation. Recent diffusion-based approaches have improved visual quality, but they almost universally rely on heavy, pretrained generative priors (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and external VAE latent spaces. In this paper, we propose Slot-RAE, a much simpler, fully integrated framework that operates directly within the continuous semantic feature space of visual foundation models (e.g., DINOv3). Slot-RAE employs a feature-space diffusion process using a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder and a Representation Alignment (REPA) head. Unlike existing diffusion-based objectcentric methods that rely heavily on subsidized text-toimage priors, the generative core of Slot-RAE (Slot Attention and the DiT) is trained from scratch within the frozen VFM feature space. This eliminates the need for VAE bottlenecks and task-agnostic generative pre-training. Experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that despite its architectural simplicity, Slot-RAE achieves state-of-the-art results. It delivers comparable unsupervised object discovery, higher-fidelity image reconstruction, and robust zero-shot compositionality, all while being significantly faster and more computationally efficient than existing object-centric latent diffusion models.

Robotic manipulation policies rely on pre-trained vision models that give either a global scene embedding or a dense patch grid. Both mix task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. Object-centric slot representations are a structured alternative: they group features into a few per-object slots. We test what this structure buys on ManiSkill3 PickCube-v1, with a frozen encoder and a held-out-seed evaluation. Holding the policy, goal token, rendering, and calibration fixed and changing only the encoder, a frozen object-centric SPOT representation (DINO ViT-B/16 + Slot Attention) reaches 55.0$\pm$2.9% success, 22.4% above a dense DINO global-feature baseline (32.6 $\pm$ 1.5%), with the same trainable policy and no encoder fine-tuning. More tokens alone do not help: a dense patch grid with 16x the tokens performs no better than the global feature. Adding an explicit 2D spatial goal and native-resolution rendering raises the full system to 68.7$\pm$4.2%, just below a privileged 3D-oracle upper bound (71.7$\pm$4.1%). An automated kinematic failure taxonomy then separates spatial-precision (Near-Miss) failures from object-tracking (No-Grasp) failures: spatial grounding reduces Near-Miss while leaving No- Grasp unchanged. The same taxonomy transfers to the harder StackCube-v1 and points to occlusion as the main bottleneck.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.

Slot attention is a powerful framework for object-centric learning, decomposing visual scenes into latent slots through iterative competitive attention. However, existing methods share two critical limitations: they decompose scenes into a flat set of slots at a single granularity, and this decomposition is based on appearance rather than semantics. Yet humans understand scenes through semantic hierarchies: separating foreground from background, recognizing object categories, and identifying individual instances. Crucially, such semantic hierarchies cannot emerge without supervision, because category names are human constructs, not visual patterns. We propose Hierarchical Slot Attention (HSA), which learns multi-granularity semantic scene decomposition from a single model. HSA decomposes scenes at three levels: holistic (foreground/background), semantic (object categories), and panoptic (individual instances). Using only 10% labeled data, combined with hierarchical alignment loss, HSA learns all three levels jointly. We further introduce grouping purity and containment to measure whether the hierarchy is encoded in representation space, not just output masks. Experiments on COCO and PASCAL VOC demonstrate that HSA outperforms the strongest flat baseline by up to \textbf{$+$41.5} ARI at holistic, \textbf{$+$14.6} at semantic, and \textbf{$+$10.4} at panoptic level on COCO, with even larger gains on Pascal VOC, while requiring a single model instead of three. Code will be made available upon acceptance.

Robotic manipulation often requires identifying functional parts, such as a mug handle or a hammer head. However, features attached to observed 3D points can vary with viewpoint and sensor noise, giving a policy inconsistent representations of the same part. We propose an object-centric semantic field to provide more consistent part-aware features for manipulation. We use the observed object cloud to build a continuous field, then read features from this field at 3D locations independently resampled from the cloud. Each feature uses the sampled object support as context, rather than directly reusing an individual point descriptor. Part classification distinguishes functional regions, cross-instance alignment brings corresponding part features together, and perturbation consistency encourages similar features under observation changes. The queried coordinates and features form semantic point clouds that are supplied to a DP3-based policy. We evaluate the approach on four RoboTwin simulation tasks and four real-world bimanual tasks, achieving average success rates of 69.3% and 67.5%, respectively. These improve on Utonia Point-wise by 7.0 and 32.5 percentage points, respectively, with real-world tests on held-out objects. A point-wise control with matched part supervision scores 63.5% in simulation, compared with our 69.3%. These results highlight the value of stable, object-conditioned semantic fields for manipulation across object instances and varying observations. Project Page: https://zainzh.github.io/beyond-point-attached-semantics.

Self-supervised image encoders deliver strong features for downstream tasks but need many images for training. A natural remedy to counter this is to make each image count for more. A scene contains many objects, and given masks from human annotators or an off-the-shelf segmentation model, pre-training can focus on aligning per-object rather than image-wide representations, extracting more signal from every image. Existing mask-supervised methods do this through reconstruction or contrastive losses that leverage negative objects. We instead use two separate projection spaces for the alignment. In a \emph{semantic space}, per-object representations from different views are aligned. To avoid collapse, instead of using negative objects, which requires category definitions, we extend the negative-free LeJEPA objective and show that its distributional anti-collapse regularizer ports naturally from whole images to the variable-sized set of objects in a scene. In an \emph{instance space}, a contrastive loss separates per-object representations from their context and co-occurring instances, including those of the same category. To separate object representations from their context, we copy objects and paste them into other contexts, where each pasted copy serves as an additional view of the original object. Trained on COCO with ground-truth masks, our method outperforms image-level and mask-guided baselines on tracking (DAVIS), classification (ImageNet-1k) and re-identification (NAVI), matches the best of them on semantic segmentation (ADE20k) and keeps its lead over image-level LeJEPA and a supervision-matched alternative on COCO fractions down to 256 images.

A 3D scene is understood through its objects, not the primitives that compose them. Yet feed-forward reconstruction methods output dense, unstructured sets of points or Gaussians, leaving object-level structure to be recovered after the fact. We propose a feed-forward framework that decomposes a scene into instance-structured 3D token groups directly from unposed multi-view images -- compact object-centric units from which reconstruction, segmentation, and manipulation all follow. Each token group pairs an instance token capturing entity-level identity with anchor tokens that encode local geometry and appearance, which are decoded into a set of 3D Gaussians. This two-level factorization decouples object identity from local appearance, making object instances a native interface of the representation rather than a derived product. The token groups are learned through differentiable rendering with joint reconstruction and segmentation supervision, requiring no 3D annotations. Our feed-forward model surpasses per-scene optimization baselines in class-agnostic instance segmentation while remaining competitive in novel view synthesis. Beyond these metrics, the same token groups directly unlock instance-level scene editing -- removing, translating, or inserting objects by operating on their groups -- as well as efficient open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval, where retrieval complexity scales with the number of instances rather than primitives.

The tracking-by-detection paradigm in multi-object tracking (MOT) typically relies on static appearance descriptors to complement motion estimation. However, these descriptors are frame-independent, limiting their robustness as visual cues. Since such descriptors are often obtained from computationally intensive pretrained backbones, real-time MOT systems frequently abandon appearance cues altogether and rely solely on motion prediction and geometric association. In this work, we introduce Polycepta, an object-centric appearance state estimation framework that reformulates appearance modeling as a recursive estimation problem rather than a frame-wise matching task. Polycepta constructs and continuously updates an independent appearance state for each tracked object, enabling future appearance representations to be estimated from accumulated observations. Polycepta is encouraged to learn the appearance-state construction of object-specific representations rather than memorize them through a proposed learning strategy, enabling appearance estimation for unseen classes. A key property of Polycepta is that the quality of appearance estimation improves as object states evolve during inference. While conventional appearance descriptors remain static or degrade over time, Polycepta progressively refines appearance estimates as additional observations are accumulated. Extensive experiments on KITTI, the Waymo Open Dataset, and MOT17 demonstrate consistent reductions in identity switches and improvements in tracking performance when integrated into the tracking-by-detection pipelines. Polycepta operates at 90.57 Hz and delivers state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark, achieving a MOTA of 92.27%.

Learning to decompose videos into persistent objects is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised object-centric representation learning. Despite recent progress, existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve accurate object segmentation, consistent identities over time, and reliable foreground-background separation. To address these challenges, we introduce UniSlot (Unified Slots), an unsupervised framework for learning robust and disentangled object-centric representations from videos. UniSlot explicitly separates object appearance from its 3D-aware geometric pose in the scene, linking object identity to appearance while leveraging depth to better distinguish objects from their surroundings. UniSlot achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised object-centric video decomposition and tracking across synthetic and real-world benchmarks, yielding substantially tighter object masks and reducing background leakage while preserving object identities. Beyond decomposition and tracking, these improved representations translate directly to downstream tasks such as unsupervised object dynamics prediction, enabling more accurate forecasting of future object trajectories.

We introduce 3D-DLP, a self-supervised object-centric representation learning model that decomposes scene-level RGB-D or voxel observations into a set of 3D latent particles. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, each particle encodes disentangled attributes, including 3D keypoint position, bounding box dimensions, and appearance features, and represents a distinct entity in the scene. The model learns interpretable per-particle segmentation maps through an end-to-end self-supervised reconstruction objective. We demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that the learned latent space is interpretable and controllable: by manipulating particle positions and decoding, we can generate novel scene configurations. Furthermore, we show that leveraging these compact 3D latent particles for downstream robotic manipulation improves performance over baselines that either lack explicit 3D information or rely on memory-intensive dense 3D inputs without object-centric structure. Code and videos are available at https://eubooks3003.github.io/3d-dlp.

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" -- they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $α_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.