From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: Synergistic Representation Learning for Unsupervised Video Object-Centric Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Seong, Hyun Seok, Moon, WonJun, Heo, Jae-Pil
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Seong, Hyun Seok
Moon, WonJun
Heo, Jae-Pil
author_facet Seong, Hyun Seok
Moon, WonJun
Heo, Jae-Pil
contents Unsupervised object-centric learning models, particularly slot-based architectures, have shown great promise in decomposing complex scenes. However, their reliance on reconstruction-based training creates a fundamental conflict between the sharp, high-frequency attention maps of the encoder and the spatially consistent but blurry reconstruction maps of the decoder. We identify that this discrepancy gives rise to a vicious cycle: the noisy feature map from the encoder forces the decoder to average over possibilities and produce even blurrier outputs, while the gradient computed from blurry reconstruction maps lacks high-frequency details necessary to supervise encoder features. To break this cycle, we introduce Synergistic Representation Learning (SRL) that establishes a virtuous cycle where the encoder and decoder mutually refine one another. SRL leverages the encoder's sharpness to deblur the semantic boundary within the decoder output, while exploiting the decoder's spatial consistency to denoise the encoder's features. This mutual refinement process is stabilized by a warm-up phase with a slot regularization objective that initially allocates distinct entities per slot. By bridging the representational gap between the encoder and decoder, SRL achieves state-of-the-art results on video object-centric learning benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/hynnsk/SRL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03390
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: Synergistic Representation Learning for Unsupervised Video Object-Centric Learning
Seong, Hyun Seok
Moon, WonJun
Heo, Jae-Pil
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Unsupervised object-centric learning models, particularly slot-based architectures, have shown great promise in decomposing complex scenes. However, their reliance on reconstruction-based training creates a fundamental conflict between the sharp, high-frequency attention maps of the encoder and the spatially consistent but blurry reconstruction maps of the decoder. We identify that this discrepancy gives rise to a vicious cycle: the noisy feature map from the encoder forces the decoder to average over possibilities and produce even blurrier outputs, while the gradient computed from blurry reconstruction maps lacks high-frequency details necessary to supervise encoder features. To break this cycle, we introduce Synergistic Representation Learning (SRL) that establishes a virtuous cycle where the encoder and decoder mutually refine one another. SRL leverages the encoder's sharpness to deblur the semantic boundary within the decoder output, while exploiting the decoder's spatial consistency to denoise the encoder's features. This mutual refinement process is stabilized by a warm-up phase with a slot regularization objective that initially allocates distinct entities per slot. By bridging the representational gap between the encoder and decoder, SRL achieves state-of-the-art results on video object-centric learning benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/hynnsk/SRL.
title From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: Synergistic Representation Learning for Unsupervised Video Object-Centric Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03390