Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning from Multiple Unspecified
  Viewpoints
Jinyang Yuan Tonglin Chen Zhimeng Shen Bin Li Xiangyang Xue
Visual scenes are extremely diverse, not only because there are infinite
possible combinations of objects and backgrounds but also because the
observations of the same scene may vary greatly with the change of viewpoints.
When observing a multi-object visual scene from multiple viewpoints, humans can
perceive the scene compositionally from each viewpoint while achieving the
so-called ``object constancy'' across different viewpoints, even though the
exact viewpoints are untold. This ability is essential for humans to identify
the same object while moving and to learn from vision efficiently. It is
intriguing to design models that have a similar ability. In this paper, we
consider a novel problem of learning compositional scene representations from
multiple unspecified (i.e., unknown and unrelated) viewpoints without using any
supervision and propose a deep generative model which separates latent
representations into a viewpoint-independent part and a viewpoint-dependent
part to solve this problem. During the inference, latent representations are
randomly initialized and iteratively updated by integrating the information in
different viewpoints with neural networks. Experiments on several specifically
designed synthetic datasets have shown that the proposed method can effectively
learn from multiple unspecified viewpoints.