[Full Talk] Thomas Kipf (Google Brain) — Transformers at Work

Slot Attention: Towards Object-centric Perception

The world around us — and our understanding of it — is rich in compositional structure: from atoms and their interactions to physical objects in our everyday environments. How can we learn models of the world that take this structure into account and generalize to new compositions in systematic ways? This talk focuses on an emerging class of slot-based neural architectures that utilize attention mechanisms to perform perceptual grouping of scenes into objects and abstract entities without direct supervision. I will briefly introduce the Slot Attention mechanism as a core representative for this class of models and show how slot-based architectures can be used for self-supervised object discovery in video and 3D scenes.