Systematic Visual Reasoning through Object-Centric Relational Abstraction

Understand

Human visual reasoning is characterized by an ability to identify abstract patterns from only a small number of examples, and to systematically generalize those patterns to novel inputs.

• This capacity depends in large part on our ability to represent complex visual inputs in terms of both objects and relations.
• Recent work in computer vision has introduced models with the capacity to extract object-centric representations, leading to the ability to process multi-object visual inputs, but falling short of the systematic generalization displayed by human reasoning.
• Other recent models have employed inductive biases for relational abstraction to achieve systematic generalization of learned abstract rules, but have generally assumed the presence of object-focused inputs.