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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Löwe, Sindy, Locatello, Francesco, Welling, Max
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05627
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author Löwe, Sindy
Locatello, Francesco
Welling, Max
author_facet Löwe, Sindy
Locatello, Francesco
Welling, Max
contents In human cognition, the binding problem describes the open question of how the brain flexibly integrates diverse information into cohesive object representations. Analogously, in machine learning, there is a pursuit for models capable of strong generalization and reasoning by learning object-centric representations in an unsupervised manner. Drawing from neuroscientific theories, Rotating Features learn such representations by introducing vector-valued features that encapsulate object characteristics in their magnitudes and object affiliation in their orientations. The "$χ$-binding" mechanism, embedded in every layer of the architecture, has been shown to be crucial, but remains poorly understood. In this paper, we propose an alternative "cosine binding" mechanism, which explicitly computes the alignment between features and adjusts weights accordingly, and we show that it achieves equivalent performance. This allows us to draw direct connections to self-attention and biological neural processes, and to shed light on the fundamental dynamics for object-centric representations to emerge in Rotating Features.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05627
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Binding Dynamics in Rotating Features
Löwe, Sindy
Locatello, Francesco
Welling, Max
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neurons and Cognition
In human cognition, the binding problem describes the open question of how the brain flexibly integrates diverse information into cohesive object representations. Analogously, in machine learning, there is a pursuit for models capable of strong generalization and reasoning by learning object-centric representations in an unsupervised manner. Drawing from neuroscientific theories, Rotating Features learn such representations by introducing vector-valued features that encapsulate object characteristics in their magnitudes and object affiliation in their orientations. The "$χ$-binding" mechanism, embedded in every layer of the architecture, has been shown to be crucial, but remains poorly understood. In this paper, we propose an alternative "cosine binding" mechanism, which explicitly computes the alignment between features and adjusts weights accordingly, and we show that it achieves equivalent performance. This allows us to draw direct connections to self-attention and biological neural processes, and to shed light on the fundamental dynamics for object-centric representations to emerge in Rotating Features.
title Binding Dynamics in Rotating Features
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05627