Object-Centric Representation Learning

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8 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 58

Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

Slots, Transitions, Loops: Learning Composable World Models for ARC

ARC tests in-context rule induction: given a few input-output demonstrations, a model must infer the hidden rule and apply it to a new query. While many approaches express ARC rules through language, code, or symbolic programs, ARC itself is visual-symbolic: rules appear as grid transitions over objects, colors, shapes, and spatial relations. We introduce Loop-OWM, an object-centric world-modeling architecture that learns these rules as composable transitions over structured states. It combines color-prototype slots, demonstration-conditioned task summaries, and a looped transition model with dense propagation and slot-conditioned correction. On both ARC-1 and ARC-2, Loop-OWM outperforms non-looped and looped baselines with comparable or fewer parameters. These results suggest that ARC rules can be learned not only as language descriptions or searched programs, but also as transitions over visual-symbolic world states.

Gege Gao, Bernhard Schölkopf, Andreas Geiger

University of Tübingen · ETH Zürich

World Model Learning Visual Reasoning Object-Centric World Models Object-Centric Representation Learning In-Context Learning

Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

MLP Splatting: Object-Centric Neural Fields

3D representations are fundamental to scene rendering, understanding, and interaction. Recent approaches, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting and Neural Radiance Fields, achieve impressive photorealistic novel-view synthesis, but lack the ability to easily decompose scene elements into a few primitives, requiring additional segmentation or grouping for object-level manipulation. We present MLP-Splatting, a method that enables scene decomposition via a few expressive light-field primitives while providing photorealistic novel-view synthesis. MLP-Splatting models each primitive as an independent compact MLP with localized spatial support that predicts radiance and opacity. In contrast to low-level Gaussian primitives or a single global radiance field, our neural primitives provide greater expressive capacity while remaining spatially localized. Rendering is performed through efficient sparse volumetric compositing over ray-primitive interactions. Our primitives are supervised using RGB supervision alone, which yields primitives that represent local scene regions often corresponding to objects or object parts, enabling interactive object-level editing without segmentation masks by selecting a handful of primitives. Our method, augmented with optional semantic feature distillation, enables open-vocabulary scene interaction and open-set instant segmentation. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, we achieve substantially lower memory usage (1/15

\times

) and faster rendering (3

\times

), as we show in our experiments compared to semantic 3DGS methods. Project Page: https://shinjeongkim.com/mlp-splatting

Shinjeong Kim, Yuzhou Cheng, Xin Kong +2

Department of Computing, Imperial College London

Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation 3D Scene Editing Neural Rendering Object-Centric Representation Learning 3D Scene Representation 3D Scene Understanding

May 30, 2026cs.CV

Physical Object Understanding with a Physically Controllable World Model

A central challenge in visual intelligence is learning the physical structure of scenes from raw videos: how regions form objects and the laws that govern their interactions. Solving these tasks requires world models capable of inferring distributional states of the world from partial observations - capabilities that current architectures do not provide. We introduce a new class of probabilistic world models that support estimation of the probability of any visual variable, such as appearance and dynamics, conditioned on any other variables. Here, we identify that these models can be trained efficiently with autoregressive sequence modeling, yielding world models from which rich object understanding emerges. First, we demonstrate that our model captures the physical laws governing how objects move by generating multiple plausible future states of the world through sequential inference. Then, by analyzing motion correlations across these futures, we extract objects and articulated object subparts. Having discovered these objects, we show that our world model can manipulate them in 3D. Finally, we demonstrate how physical relationships between objects can be computed from the world model, enabling applications such as Visual Jenga.

Rahul Venkatesh, Klemen Kotar, Lilian Naing Chen +9

Stanford University · OpenAI · Noetik Inc. +1

Physical Reasoning World Model Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning Video World Models 3D Scene Understanding

May 29, 2026cs.CV

Internalizing Temporal Consistency in Video Object-Centric Learning without Explicit Regularization

Video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aims to represent objects as \textit{slot} vectors and maintain their consistency across frames. Slot-Slot Contrastive (SSC) loss has become the cornerstone for state-of-the-art (SOTA) video OCL methods. While highly effective, SSC relies on one-to-one object correspondence across frames and introduces an extra loss. Following Occam's Razor, we propose a paradigm shift: temporal consistency is better enforced as an implicit model design rather than an explicit loss. To elegantly exclude SSC (\textbf{xSSC}), we introduce two quasi-zero-overhead synergistic mechanisms: (\textit{i}) Chrono-Channel Decomposition (CCD) structurally disentangles slot representations along the channel dimension into \textit{static} and \textit{dynamic} sub-spaces, serving as an empirically unified information bottleneck; (\textit{ii}) Cross-Temporal Reconstruction (CTR) stochastically reconstructs target features of either the current or previous time step by fusing current slots' static channels and target slots' dynamic channels, using a single standard OCL decoder with minor training adaptation. Thereby, the slot sets inherently learn temporal consistency by minimizing the standard reconstruction error alone. Extensive experiments show that integrating xSSC into leading baselines not only improves training efficiency but also establishes new SOTAs on video object discovery and recognition tasks. Furthermore, our PCA and gradient analyses confirm that objects' time-invariant semantics and time-variant kinematics are encoded into the proposed sub-spaces. Our source code, model checkpoints and training logs are provided on https://github.com/Genera1Z/xSSC.

Rongzhen Zhao, Zhiyuan Li, Juho Kannala +1

Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Finland · Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland · Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu, Finland

Disentangled Representation Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning

May 28, 2026cs.CV

Cycle Consistency in Video Object-Centric Learning

Self-supervised video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aims to discover distinct objects and associate them across time, whereas self-supervised Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) focuses on associating pre-defined object detections or segmentations. Although well-established in MOT, Cycle Consistency (CC) cannot naively or explicitly apply to the latent slot space of OCL. Unlike the deterministic and ideal object representations in MOT, OCL slots are inherently stochastic and ambiguous due to non-unique scene decompositions. Enforcing explicit cycle consistency (ECC) on slots imposes rigid mean seeking. This severely penalizes the model for exploring alternative but equally valid decompositions, thereby driving towards feature collapse. To resolve this dilemma, we propose \textit{Implicit Cycle Consistency (ICC)}, which shifts the cycle-consistency constraint from the restrictive slot space to the continuous reconstruction manifold, encouraging slots to reach a soft consensus on collectively interpreting the visual scene rather than forcing rigid point-to-point feature alignment. Extensive experiments on complex video OCL benchmarks demonstrate that ICC avoids feature collapse and outperforms ECC baselines. Our source code, model checkpoints and training logs are provided on https://github.com/Genera1Z/ICC.

Rongzhen Zhao, Zhiyuan Li, Ruonan Wei +2

Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland · School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland +1

Self-Supervised Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning

May 18, 2026cs.AI

WorldString: Actionable World Representation

Inspired by the emergent behaviors in large language models that generalized human intelligence, the research community is pursuing similar emergent capabilities within world models, with a emphasis on modeling the physical world. Within the scope of physical world model, objects are the fundamental primitives that constitute physical reality. From humans to computers, nearly everything we interact with is an object. These objects are rarely static; they are actionable entities with varying states determined by their intrinsic properties. While current methods approach object action states either via video generation or dynamic scene reconstruction, none explicitly model this basic element in a unified, principled way to build an actionable object representation. We propose WorldString, a neural architecture capable of modeling the state manifold of real-world objects by learning directly from point clouds or RGB-D video streams. Serving as a versatile digital twin, it acts as a foundational building block for physical world models; thus, we name it WorldString. Sweetly, its fully differentiable structure seamlessly enables future integration with policy learning and neural dynamics.

Kunqi Xu, Jitao Li, Jianglong Ye +4

Tsinghua University - IEI Lab · CalTech · UC San Diego +1

World Model Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning Digital Twins

May 14, 2026cs.LG

Slot-MPC: Goal-Conditioned Model Predictive Control with Object-Centric Representations

Predictive world models enable agents to model scene dynamics and reason about the consequences of their actions. Inspired by human perception, object-centric world models capture scene dynamics using object-level representations, which can be used for downstream applications such as action planning. However, most object-centric world models and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn reactive policies that are fixed at inference time, limiting generalization to novel situations. We propose Slot-MPC, an object-centric world modeling framework that enables planning through Model Predictive Control (MPC). Slot-MPC leverages vision encoders to learn slot-based representations, which encode individual objects in the scene, and uses these structured representations to learn an action-conditioned object-centric dynamics model. At inference time, the learned dynamics model enables action planning via MPC, allowing agents to adapt to previously unseen situations. Since the learned world model is differentiable, we can use gradient-based MPC to directly optimize actions, which is computationally more efficient than relying on gradient-free, sampling-based MPC methods. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that Slot-MPC improves both task performance and planning efficiency compared to non-object-centric world model baselines. In the considered offline setting with limited state-action coverage, we find that gradient-based MPC performs better than gradient-free, sampling-based MPC. Our results demonstrate that explicitly structured, object-centric representations provide a strong inductive bias for controllable and generalizable decision-making. Code and additional results are available at https://slot-mpc.github.io.

Jonathan Spieler, Angel Villar-Corrales, Sven Behnke

Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Computer Science Institute VI - Intelligent Systems and Robotics, Center for Robotics and the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, University of Bonn, Germany

World Models for Robotics World Model-Based Planning Action-Conditioned World Models Object-Centric Representation Learning Model Predictive Control Robotic Manipulation

May 13, 2026cs.CV

EvObj: Learning Evolving Object-centric Representations for 3D Instance Segmentation without Scene Supervision

We introduce EvObj for unsupervised 3D instance segmentation that bridges the geometric domain gap between synthetic pretraining data and real-world point clouds. Current methods suffer from structural discrepancies when transferring object priors from synthetic datasets (e.g., ShapeNet) to real scans (e.g., ScanNet), particularly due to morphological variations and occlusion artifacts. To address this, EvObj integrates two innovative modules: (1) An object discerning module that dynamically refines object candidates, enabling continuous adaptation of object priors to target domains; and (2) An object completion module that reconstructs partial geometries after discovering objects. We conduct extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating superior 3D object segmentation performance over all baselines while achieving state-of-the-art results.

Jiahao Chen, Zihui Zhang, Yafei Yang +4

Shenzhen Research Institute, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · vLAR Group, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation Object-Centric Representation Learning 3D Shape Completion 3D Instance Segmentation

May 12, 2026cs.CV

What-Where Transformer: A Slot-Centric Visual Backbone for Concurrent Representation and Localization

Many image understanding tasks involve identifying what is present and where it appears. However, tasks that address where, such as object discovery, detection, and segmentation, are often considerably more complex than image classification, which primarily focuses on what. One possible reason is that classification-oriented backbones tend to emphasize semantic information about what, while implicitly entangling or suppressing information about where. In this work, we focus on an inductive bias termed what-where separation, which encourages models to represent object appearance and spatial location in a decomposed manner. To incorporate this bias throughout an attentive backbone in the style of Vision Transformer (ViT), we propose the What-Where Transformer (WWT). Our method introduces two key novel designs: (1) it treats tokens as representations of what and attention maps as representations of where, and processes them in concurrent feed-forward modules via a multi-stream, slot-based architecture; (2) it reuses both the final-layer tokens and attention maps for downstream tasks, and directly exposes them to gradients derived from task losses, thereby facilitating more effective and explicit learning of localization. We demonstrate that even under standard single-label classification-based supervision on ImageNet, WWT exhibits emergent multiple object discovery directly from raw attention maps, rather than via additional postprocessing such as token clustering. Furthermore, WWT achieves superior performance compared to ViT-based methods on zero-shot object discovery and weakly supervised semantic segmentation, and it is transferable to various localization setups with minimal modifications. Code will be published after acceptance.

Ryota Yoshihashi, Masahiro Kada, Satoshi Ikehata +2

Institute of Science Tokyo · 2DENSO IT Laboratory · 3National Institute of Informatics

Visual Attention Vision Transformer Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Object-Centric Representation Learning Object Detection Semantic Segmentation

May 12, 2026cs.LG

Unlocking Compositional Generalization in Continual Few-Shot Learning

Object-centric representations promise a key property for few-shot learning: Rather than treating a scene as a single unit, a model can decompose it into individual object-level parts that can be matched and compared across different concepts. In practice, this potential is rarely realized. Continual learners either collapse scenes into global embeddings, or train with part-level matching objectives that tie representations too closely to seen patterns, leaving them unable to generalize to truly novel concepts. In this paper, we identify this fundamental structural conflict and pioneer a new paradigm that strictly decouples representation learning from compositional inference. Leveraging the inherent patch-level semantic geometry of self-supervised Vision Transformers (ViTs), our framework employs a dual-phase strategy. During training, slot representations are optimized entirely toward holistic class identity, preserving highly generalizable, object-level geometries. At inference, preserved slots are dynamically composed to match novel scenes. We demonstrate that this paradigm offers dual structural benefits: The frozen backbone naturally prevents representation drift, while our lightweight, holistic optimization preserves the features' capacity for novel-concept transfer. Extensive experiments validate this approach, achieving state-of-the-art unseen-concept generalization and minimal forgetting across standard continual learning benchmarks.

Phu-Quy Nguyen-Lam, Phu-Hoa Pham, Dao Sy Duy Minh +3

Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. · Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.

Object-Centric Representation Learning Few-Shot Learning Compositional Generalization

May 8, 2026cs.CV

InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Hongyang Zhang, Maonan Wang, Ziyao Wang +2

School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Guangdong 518172, China · Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR 999077, China · Shanghai AI Laboratory, Shanghai 200032, China

Multi-View Consistency Cross-View Geo-Localization Object-Centric Representation Learning

May 7, 2026cs.RO

OA-WAM: Object-Addressable World Action Model for Robust Robot Manipulation

World Action Models (WAMs) enhance Vision-Language-Action policies by jointly predicting scene evolution and robot actions, but existing methods usually represent the predicted world as holistic images, video tokens, or global latents. These representations are difficult for an action decoder to address when an instruction refers to a particular object, especially under scene shifts where object identity is entangled with context. We propose OA-WAM, an Object-Addressable World Action Model for robust robot manipulation. OA-WAM decomposes each frame into N+1 slot states, with one robot slot and N object slots. Each slot contains a persistent address vector and a time-varying content vector, and is fused with text, image, proprioception, and past-action tokens in a block-causal sequence. A world head predicts next-frame slot states, while a flow-matching action head decodes a 16-step continuous action chunk in the same forward pass. Addressability is enforced by routing cross-slot attention through address-only keys and resetting the address slice at every transformer layer, separating which object to act on from what that object currently is without adding extra tokens. OA-WAM matches strong VLA and WAM baselines on LIBERO (97.8%) and SimplerEnv (79.3%), reaches state-of-the-art performance on the most relevant LIBERO-Plus geometric axes, and remains competitive on the seven-axis aggregate. A causal slot-intervention test yields a swap-binding cosine of 0.87, versus at most 0.09 for holistic baselines. These results suggest that addressable object states provide an effective interface for robust world-action modeling under scene perturbations.

Yushan Liu, Peibo Sun, Shoujie Li +7

Tsinghua University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Nanyang Technological University

World Models for Robotics Action-Conditioned World Models Object-Centric World Models Object-Centric Representation Learning Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models+1

May 5, 2026cs.LG

Weakly Supervised Concept Learning for Object-centric Visual Reasoning

Neurosymbolic systems promise to combine deep neural network's (DNN) processing of raw sensor inputs with few-shot performance of symbolic artificial intelligence. Two-stage approaches explicitly decouple DNN based perception from subsequent rule based reasoning. This avoids optimization and interpretability issues of end to end differentiable approaches, but requires costly labels for the perception output. This paper introduces an efficient weak supervision scheme for the perception stage to ground its output symbols for logical induction in object-centric reasoning tasks. It combines a slot-based architecture for object-centricity with a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for self-supervision, competing with concept guidance on latent dimensions for human interpretable grounding. The resulting predictions are translated into symbolic background knowledge for reasoning frameworks, such as Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), Decision Trees, and Bayesian Networks. Our extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic and real world datasets shows that our approach can discover complex, abstract rules for object centric reasoning whilst reducing supervision to as little as 1% of labels, and being robust even under substantial domain shift. Notably, at 1% supervision it even outperforms state of the art foundation model baselines in domain generalization

Sparsh Tiwari, Bettina Finzel, Gesina Schwalbe

University of Lübeck, Germany · University of Bamberg, Germany · University of Ulm, Germany

Visual Reasoning Object-Centric Representation Learning Weakly Supervised Learning Visually Grounded Reasoning Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

May 5, 2026cs.CV

Rethinking Temporal Consistency in Video Object-Centric Learning: From Prediction to Correspondence

The de facto approach in video object-centric learning maintains temporal consistency through learned dynamics modules that predict future object representations, called slots. We demonstrate that these predictors function as expensive approximations of discrete correspondence problems. Modern self-supervised vision backbones already encode instance-discriminative features that distinguish objects reliably. Exploiting these features eliminates the need for learned temporal prediction. We introduce Grounded Correspondence, a framework that replaces learned transition functions with deterministic bipartite matching. Slots initialize from salient regions in frozen backbone features. Frame-to-frame identity is maintained through Hungarian matching on slot representations. The approach requires zero learnable parameters for temporal modeling yet achieves competitive performance on MOVi-D, MOVi-E, and YouTube-VIS. Project page: https://magenta-sherbet-85b101.netlify.app/

Zhiyuan Li, Rongzhen Zhao, Wenyan Yang +3

Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Finland · Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland

Object-Centric Representation Learning

May 1, 2026cs.CV

SIMON: Saliency-aware Integrative Multi-view Object-centric Neural Decoding

Recent EEG-to-image retrieval methods leverage pretrained vision encoders and foveation-inspired priors, but typically assume a fixed, center-focused view. This center bias conflicts with content-driven human attention, creating a geometric-semantic dissociation between visual features and EEG responses. We propose SIMON, a saliency-aware multi-view framework for zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval. SIMON combines foreground segmentation and saliency prediction to select fixation centers via Saliency-Aware Sampling (SAS), then generates foveated views that emphasize informative object regions while suppressing background clutter. On THINGS-EEG, SIMON achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intra-subject and inter-subject settings, reaching an average Top-1 accuracy of 69.7% and 19.6%, respectively, consistently outperforming recent competitive baselines. Analyses across sampling granularity, EEG channel topology, and visual/brain encoder backbones further support the robustness of saliency-aware multi-view integration. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/simonlink666/SIMON.

YuSheng Lin, Ji-Hwa Tsai, Chun-Shu Wei

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

EEG-Based Visual Decoding Multi-View Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning Visual Saliency

Apr 24, 2026cs.CV

GenMatter: Perceiving Physical Objects with Generative Matter Models

Human visual perception offers valuable insights for understanding computational principles of motion-based scene interpretation. Humans robustly detect and segment moving entities that constitute independently moveable chunks of matter, whether observing sparse moving dots, textured surfaces, or naturalistic scenes. In contrast, existing computer vision systems lack a unified approach that works across these diverse settings. Inspired by principles of human perception, we propose a generative model that hierarchically groups low-level motion cues and high-level appearance features into particles (small Gaussians representing local matter), and groups particles into clusters capturing coherently and independently moveable physical entities. We develop a hardware-accelerated inference algorithm based on parallelized block Gibbs sampling to recover stable particle motion and groupings. Our model operates on different kinds of inputs (random dots, stylized textures, or naturalistic RGB video), enabling it to work across settings where biological vision succeeds but existing computer vision approaches do not. We validate this unified framework across three domains: on 2D random dot kinematograms, our approach captures human object perception including graded uncertainty across ambiguous conditions; on a Gestalt-inspired dataset of camouflaged rotating objects, our approach recovers correct 3D structure from motion and thereby accurate 2D object segmentation; and on naturalistic RGB videos, our model tracks the moving 3D matter that makes up deforming objects, enabling robust object-level scene understanding. This work thus establishes a general framework for motion-based perception grounded in principles of human vision.

Eric Li, Arijit Dasgupta, Yoni Friedman +5

1MIT CSAIL · 2MIT BCS

Video Object Segmentation Object-Centric Representation Learning Structure from Motion 3D Scene Understanding

Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Unsupervised Learning of Inter-Object Relationships via Group Homomorphism

While current deep learning models achieve high performance by learning statistical correlations from vast datasets,which stands in stark contrast to human learning. They lack the flexibility of humans-particularly preverbal infants-to autonomously acquire the underlying structure of the world from limited experience and adapt to novel situations. In this study, we propose an unsupervised representation learning method based on a hierarchical relationship in group operations, rather than statistical independence, aiming to build a computational model of the cognitive development of infants. The proposed model features an integrated architecture that simultaneously performs object segmentation and the extraction of motion laws from dynamic image sequences. By introducing the Homomorphism from algebra as a structural constraint within a neural network, the model structurally separates pixel-level changes into meaningful, decomposed transformation components, such as translation and deformation. Using interaction scenes (chasing and evading tasks) based on developmental science findings, we experimentally demonstrate that the model can segment multiple objects into individual slots without any ground-truth labels. Furthermore, we confirmed that relative movements between objects, such as approaching or receding, are accurately mapped and structured into a one-dimensional additive latent space. These results suggest that by introducing algebraic geometric constraints rather than relying solely on statistical correlation learning, physically interpretable "disentangled representations" can be acquired. This study contributes to the understanding of the process by which infants internalize environmental laws as structures and provides a new perspective for constructing artificial systems with developmental intelligence.

Kyotaro Ushida, Takayuki Komatsu, Yoshiyuki Ohmura +1

Mechano-Informatics Department, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Disentangled Representation Learning Representation Learning Unsupervised Representation Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning

Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Deep Sprite-based Image Models: An Analysis

While foundation models drive steady progress in image segmentation and diffusion algorithms compose always more realistic images, the seemingly simple problem of identifying recurrent patterns in a collection of images remains very much open. In this paper, we focus on sprite-based image decomposition models, which have shown some promise for clustering and image decomposition and are appealing because of their high interpretability. These models come in different flavors, need to be tailored to specific datasets, and struggle to scale to images with many objects. We dive into the details of their design, identify their core components, and perform an extensive analysis on clustering benchmarks. We leverage this analysis to propose a deep sprite-based image decomposition method that performs on par with state-of-the-art unsupervised class-aware image segmentation methods on the standard CLEVR benchmark, scales linearly with the number of objects, identifies explicitly object categories, and fully models images in an easily interpretable way.

Zeynep Sonat Baltacı, Romain Loiseau, Mathieu Aubry

LIGM, CNRS, Univ Gustave Eiffel, ENPC, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

Clustering Object-Centric Representation Learning Image Clustering Unsupervised Image Segmentation

Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

OFlow: Injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching for Robust Robotic Manipulation

Robust robotic manipulation requires not only predicting how the scene evolves over time, but also recognizing task-relevant objects in complex scenes. However, existing VLA models face two limitations. They typically act only on the current frame, while future prediction and object-aware reasoning are often learned in separate latent spaces. We propose OFlow (injecting Object-Aware Temporal Flow Matching into VLAs), a framework that addresses both limitations by unifying temporal foresight and object-aware reasoning in a shared semantic latent space. Our method forecasts future latents with temporal flow matching, factorizes them into object-aware representations that emphasize physically relevant cues while filtering task-irrelevant variation, and conditions continuous action generation on these predictions. By integrating OFlow into VLA pipelines, our method enables more reliable control under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, MetaWorld, and SimplerEnv benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that object-aware foresight consistently enhances robustness and success.

Kuanning Wang, Ke Fan, Chenhao Qiu +5

Fudan University Shanghai, China · University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA, USA · KAUST Saudi Arabia

VLM Robustness Flow Matching Object-Centric Representation Learning Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models

Apr 10, 2026cs.CV

Scene-Agnostic Object-Centric Representation Learning for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Recent works on 3D scene understanding leverage 2D masks from visual foundation models (VFMs) to supervise radiance fields, enabling instance-level 3D segmentation. However, the supervision signals from foundation models are not fundamentally object-centric and often require additional mask pre/post-processing or specialized training and loss design to resolve mask identity conflicts across views. The learned identity of the 3D scene is scene-dependent, limiting generalizability across scenes. Therefore, we propose a dataset-level, object-centric supervision scheme to learn object representations in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Building on a pre-trained slot attention-based Global Object Centric Learning (GOCL) module, we learn a scene-agnostic object codebook that provides consistent, identity-anchored representations across views and scenes. By coupling the codebook with the module's unsupervised object masks, we can directly supervise the identity features of 3D Gaussians without additional mask pre-/post-processing or explicit multi-view alignment. The learned scene-agnostic codebook enables object supervision and identification without per-scene fine-tuning or retraining. Our method thus introduces unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) into 3DGS, yielding more structured representations and better generalization for downstream tasks such as robotic interaction, scene understanding, and cross-scene generalization.

Tsuheng Hsu, Guiyu Liu, Juho Kannala +1

Aalto University · University of Oulu

3D Gaussian Splatting Unsupervised Representation Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning 3D Instance Segmentation

Mar 14, 2026cs.CV

Human-like Object Grouping in Self-supervised Vision Transformers

Vision foundation models trained with self-supervised objectives achieve strong performance across diverse tasks and exhibit emergent object segmentation properties. However, their alignment with human object perception remains poorly understood. Here, we introduce a behavioral benchmark in which participants make same/different object judgments for dot pairs on naturalistic scenes, scaling up a classical psychophysics paradigm to over 1000 trials. We test a diverse set of vision models using a simple readout from their representations to predict subjects' reaction times. We observe a steady improvement across model generations, with both architecture and training objective contributing to alignment, and transformer-based models trained with the DINO self-supervised objective showing the strongest performance. To investigate the source of this improvement, we propose a novel metric to quantify the object-centric component of representations by measuring patch similarity within and between objects. Across models, stronger object-centric structure predicts human segmentation behavior more accurately. We further show that matching the Gram matrix of supervised transformer models, capturing similarity structure across image patches, with that of a self-supervised model through distillation improves their alignment with human behavior, converging with the prior finding that Gram anchoring improves DINOv3's feature quality. Together, these results demonstrate that self-supervised vision models capture object structure in a behaviorally human-like manner, and that Gram matrix structure plays a role in driving perceptual alignment.

Hossein Adeli, Seoyoung Ahn, Andrew Luo +3

Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York · Department of Social Science and AI, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul · University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong +2

Object-Centric Representation Learning Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

Feb 24, 2026cs.CV

COMiT: Learning Structured Visual Tokens through Sequential Communication

Discrete image tokenizers provide a sequential interface for vision and multimodal models, but are typically optimized for reconstruction or compression and therefore tend to encode local appearance rather than object-level structure. We introduce COMiT, a communication-inspired framework for learning structured discrete visual representations. COMiT constructs a fixed-length latent message through sequential visual observations: at each step, a transformer processes a localized image crop and updates, refines, and reorganizes the existing token sequence. After several iterations, the resulting message conditions a flow-matching decoder that reconstructs the complete image. The encoder and decoder are implemented within a single transformer and trained end-to-end using flow-matching reconstruction and semantic representation-alignment objectives. COMiT substantially improves compositional generalization and relational reasoning over prior methods. Our experiments show that, while semantic alignment helps ground the representation, attentive sequential tokenization is critical for inducing more interpretable, object-centric token structures.

Aram Davtyan, Yusuf Sahin, Yasaman Haghighi +4

Computer Vision Group, University of Bern, Switzerland · VITA Lab, EPFL, Switzerland

Image Tokenization Visual Tokenization Object-Centric Representation Learning Compositional Generalization

Feb 12, 2026cs.CV

Modeling The Object Representations Underlying Human Physical Reasoning

Humans appear to represent objects when reasoning about physics with coarse, volumetric "bodies" that smooth concavities, trading fine visual detail for efficient physical predictions. Yet, the structure of these representations remains largely unknown. Segmentation models, in contrast, are trained for pixel-accurate masks that may misalign with such bodies. We ask whether and when these models nonetheless acquire human-like object representations. Using a time-to-collision (TTC) and change detection (CD) behavioral task with data from 178 and 50 human participants, respectively, we introduce a pipeline and an alignment metric to compare the visual representations of segmentation models to those of humans. We do this systematically on multiple architectures (DINOv2, SegFormer, DeepLabV3+, and UPerNet), varying their size and training time. We find that briefly trained models segment objects too coarsely, aligning poorly with humans, while fully trained models segment objects too finely. For each model, there is an intermediate training regime that best matches the coarse bodies observed in human behaviour, and larger models tend to reach it earlier. We show these bodies emerge under resource constraints in general-purpose vision models, providing computational support to resource-rational accounts of human cognition. This work provides a foundational framework for testing alignment between vision models and humans and shows there is a growing gap between the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence and human cognition, driven by scaling model size and training.

Andrey Gizdov, Andrea Procopio, Lorenzo Caputi +4

Harvard University · Weizmann Institute of Science · Bocconi University

Physical Reasoning Computational Cognitive Modeling Object-Centric Representation Learning Representation Alignment Semantic Segmentation

Jan 29, 2026cs.RO

Spotlighting Task-Relevant Features: Object-Centric Representations for Better Generalization in Robotic Manipulation

The generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies are heavily influenced by the choice of visual representations. Existing approaches typically rely on representations extracted from pre-trained encoders, using two dominant types of features: global features, which summarize an entire image via a single pooled vector, and dense features, which preserve a patch-wise embedding from the final encoder layer. While widely used, both feature types mix task-relevant and irrelevant information, leading to poor generalization under distribution shifts, such as changes in lighting, textures, or the presence of distractors. In this work, we explore an intermediate structured alternative: Slot-Based Object-Centric Representations (SBOCR), which group dense features into a finite set of object-like entities. This representation permits to naturally reduce the noise provided to the robotic manipulation policy while keeping enough information to efficiently perform the task. We benchmark a range of global and dense representations against intermediate slot-based representations, across a suite of simulated and real-world manipulation tasks ranging from simple to complex. We evaluate their generalization under diverse visual conditions, including changes in lighting, texture, and the presence of distractors. Our findings reveal that SBOCR-based policies outperform dense and global representation-based policies in generalization settings, even without task-specific pretraining. These insights suggest that SBOCR is a promising direction for designing visual systems that generalize effectively in dynamic, real-world robotic environments.

Alexandre Chapin, Bruno Machado, Emmanuel Dellandréa +1

LIRIS, imagine

Visual Representation Learning Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Object-Centric Representation Learning Robotic Manipulation Robot Policy Generalization

Jan 28, 2026cs.RO

STORM: Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation

Visual foundation models provide strong perceptual features for robotics, but their dense representations lack explicit object-level structure, limiting robustness and controllability in manipulation tasks. We propose STORM (Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation), a lightweight object-centric adaptation module that augments frozen visual foundation models with a small set of task-aware slots for robotic manipulation. Rather than fully tuning large backbones on the task, STORM employs an efficient two-stage training strategy: few layers of object-centric representation are first trained on top of the frozen backbone through visual--semantic pretraining using language embeddings, then jointly adapted with a downstream manipulation policy for task alignement. This staged learning prevents degenerate slot formation and preserves semantic consistency while aligning perception with task objectives. Experiments on object discovery benchmarks and robotic manipulation tasks show that STORM improves control performance and generalization to visual shifts (distractors, textures, lighting) compared to directly using frozen or fine-tuned foundation model features, or existing object-centric representations. STORM serves not only as an efficient mechanism for refining generic foundation model features, but also as a novel way of injecting beneficial structural and semantic bias into policy learning.

Alexandre Chapin, Emmanuel Dellandréa, Liming Chen

LIRIS · Ecole Centrale de Lyon, LIRIS, 69130, Ecully, France

Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Object-Centric Representation Learning Robotic Manipulation

Nov 10, 2025cs.RO

SlotVLA: Towards Modeling of Object-Relation Representations in Robotic Manipulation

Inspired by how humans reason over discrete objects and their relationships, we explore whether compact object-centric and object-relation representations can form a foundation for multitask robotic manipulation. Most existing robotic multitask models rely on dense embeddings that entangle both object and background cues, raising concerns about both efficiency and interpretability. In contrast, we study object-relation-centric representations as a pathway to more structured, efficient, and explainable visuomotor control. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce LIBERO+, a fine-grained benchmark dataset designed to enable and evaluate object-relation reasoning in robotic manipulation. Unlike prior datasets, LIBERO+ provides object-centric annotations that enrich demonstrations with box- and mask-level labels as well as instance-level temporal tracking, supporting compact and interpretable visuomotor representations. Second, we propose SlotVLA, a slot-attention-based framework that captures both objects and their relations for action decoding. It uses a slot-based visual tokenizer to maintain consistent temporal object representations, a relation-centric decoder to produce task-relevant embeddings, and an LLM-driven module that translates these embeddings into executable actions. Experiments on LIBERO+ demonstrate that object-centric slot and object-relation slot representations drastically reduce the number of required visual tokens, while providing competitive generalization. Together, LIBERO+ and SlotVLA provide a compact, interpretable, and effective foundation for advancing object-relation-centric robotic manipulation.

Taisei Hanyu, Nhat Chung, Huy Le +10

University of Arkansas, USA · FPT Software AI Center, Vietnam · University of Stuttgart, Germany +5

Representation Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Slot Attention+1

Date pendingcs.CV

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

Multimodal large language models (MLLM) for surgical scene understanding typically inject hundreds of dense visual tokens into a language model, leading to costly inference and limited spatial traceability for generated answers. We present Slot2Text, a dual-mode surgical MLLM that replaces dense representations of visual input with a compact set of regions encoded as slot latents. Instead of relying on contrastive alignment of the visual encoder with language, Slot2Text groups self-supervised vision features into a few regions--slots that are consumed by the language model as area-labeled visual tokens. Slot2Text-Fast uses the slot prefix to answer surgical questions. Slot2Text-Reason also identifies and locates areas relevant for reasoning, linking language outputs to corresponding slot tokens, masks or regions. Experiments on multiple visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks show that Slot2Text-Fast is competitive with state-of-the-art baseline at a much lower cost, reducing the average total token consumption by a 91.8% and the visual prefix from 1,295 to 47 tokens (a 96.4% reduction). Slot2Text-Reason trades additional tokens and latency for explicit area identities, locations, and traceable spatial evidence. These results establish compact slot latents as an efficient default visual interface for surgical MLLMs, with grounded reasoning invoked when greater spatial traceability is required.

Guiqiu Liao, Matjaz Jogan, Daniel A. Hashimoto

GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania · PCASO Laboratory, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania · Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

Image Tokenization Healthcare Efficient VLM Inference Visual Tokenization Medical VQA Object-Centric Representation Learning+5

Date pendingcs.CV

What Moves? Localized Motion Representations for Compositional Scene Control

Real-world dynamics are inherently compositional: multiple entities move simultaneously within a shared scene, each exhibiting distinct motion patterns. Yet current motion representation models entangle the dynamics of different entities, without explicitly capturing localized motion for each individually. Crucially, motion is defined relative to a global reference frame, including camera motion and scene layout. However, localized embeddings are often computed from cropped images or obtained by masking features after encoding, discarding the context needed to interpret motion. To address this, we introduce a promptable localized motion representation that produces persistent embeddings for user-specified regions defined by spatial masks. Rather than cropping the input or masking features, our model processes the full video and conditions motion encoding directly on the queried region. This yields temporally consistent, region-addressable embeddings that isolate local dynamics while retaining the global context required for disambiguation. We demonstrate object-level motion transfer, enabling controlled composition of dynamic scenes. Beyond generative control, our embeddings support localized action classification in multi-actor videos. Across both tasks, our approach improves controllability and outperforms global representations localized through cropping or post-hoc masking.

Frank Fundel, Malek Ben Alaya, Thomas Ressler-Antal +2

Representation Learning Object-Centric Representation Learning Video Representation Learning Motion Representation Learning Controllable Video Generation