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arXiv · 2305.19550

Spotlight Attention: Robust Object-Centric Learning With a Spatial Locality Prior

Ayush Chakravarthy·Trang Nguyen·Anirudh Goyal·Yoshua Bengio·Michael C. Mozer
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Abstract

The aim of object-centric vision is to construct an explicit representation of the objects in a scene. This representation is obtained via a set of interchangeable modules called \emph{slots} or \emph{object files} that compete for local patches of an image. The competition has a weak inductive bias to preserve spatial continuity; consequently, one slot may claim patches scattered diffusely throughout the image. In contrast, the inductive bias of human vision is strong, to the degree that attention has classically been described with a spotlight metaphor. We incorporate a spatial-locality prior into state-of-the-art object-centric vision models and obtain significant improvements in segmenting objects in both synthetic and real-world datasets. Similar to human visual attention, the combination of image content and spatial constraints yield robust unsupervised object-centric learning, including less sensitivity to model hyperparameters.

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Ayush Chakravarthy, Trang Nguyen, Anirudh Goyal, Yoshua Bengio, Michael C. Mozer. 2023-05-31. Spotlight Attention: Robust Object-Centric Learning With a Spatial Locality Prior. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19550

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