Our guest speaker is Thomas Kipf from Google Brain and you are all cordially invited to the CVG Seminar on July 22nd at 2:30 p.m. CET on Zoom (passcode is 809285).

Abstract

The world around us — and our understanding of it — is rich in compositional structure: from atoms and their interactions to objects and entities in our 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 cover our recent extension of Slot Attention to multi-object video (SAVi). I will further give an overview of our new work on 1) extending SAVi to real-world video on the Waymo Open dataset (SAVi++), and 2) using Slot Attention in a scene representation transformer architecture to radically speed up 3D-centric object discovery via novel view synthesis (Object Scene Representation Transformer, OSRT).

Bio

Thomas is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam working with Max Welling. For his Ph.D. thesis on Deep Learning with Graph-Structured Representations, he received the ELLIS Ph.D. Award 2021. He is broadly interested in developing and studying machine learning models that can reason about the rich structure of both the physical and digital world and its combinatorial complexity. This includes topics in graph representation learning, object-centric learning, and causal representation learning.