Generalized multi-object classification and tracking with sparse feature resonator networks

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Hauptverfasser: Supic, Lazar, Mullen, Alec, Frady, E. Paxon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Supic, Lazar
Mullen, Alec
Frady, E. Paxon
author_facet Supic, Lazar
Mullen, Alec
Frady, E. Paxon
contents In visual scene understanding tasks, it is essential to capture both invariant and equivariant structure. While neural networks are frequently trained to achieve invariance to transformations such as translation, this often comes at the cost of losing access to equivariant information - e.g., the precise location of an object. Moreover, invariance is not naturally guaranteed through supervised learning alone, and many architectures generalize poorly to input transformations not encountered during training. Here, we take an approach based on analysis-by-synthesis and factoring using resonator networks. A generative model describes the construction of simple scenes containing MNIST digits and their transformations, like color and position. The resonator network inverts the generative model, and provides both invariant and equivariant information about particular objects. Sparse features learned from training data act as a basis set to provide flexibility in representing variable shapes of objects, allowing the resonator network to handle previously unseen digit shapes from the test set. The modular structure provides a shape module which contains information about the object shape with translation factored out, allowing a simple classifier to operate on centered digits. The classification layer is trained solely on centered data, requiring much less training data, and the network as a whole can identify objects with arbitrary translations without data augmentation. The natural attention-like mechanism of the resonator network also allows for analysis of scenes with multiple objects, where the network dynamics selects and centers only one object at a time. Further, the specific position information of a particular object can be extracted from the translation module, and we show that the resonator can be designed to track multiple moving objects with precision of a few pixels.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized multi-object classification and tracking with sparse feature resonator networks
Supic, Lazar
Mullen, Alec
Frady, E. Paxon
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In visual scene understanding tasks, it is essential to capture both invariant and equivariant structure. While neural networks are frequently trained to achieve invariance to transformations such as translation, this often comes at the cost of losing access to equivariant information - e.g., the precise location of an object. Moreover, invariance is not naturally guaranteed through supervised learning alone, and many architectures generalize poorly to input transformations not encountered during training. Here, we take an approach based on analysis-by-synthesis and factoring using resonator networks. A generative model describes the construction of simple scenes containing MNIST digits and their transformations, like color and position. The resonator network inverts the generative model, and provides both invariant and equivariant information about particular objects. Sparse features learned from training data act as a basis set to provide flexibility in representing variable shapes of objects, allowing the resonator network to handle previously unseen digit shapes from the test set. The modular structure provides a shape module which contains information about the object shape with translation factored out, allowing a simple classifier to operate on centered digits. The classification layer is trained solely on centered data, requiring much less training data, and the network as a whole can identify objects with arbitrary translations without data augmentation. The natural attention-like mechanism of the resonator network also allows for analysis of scenes with multiple objects, where the network dynamics selects and centers only one object at a time. Further, the specific position information of a particular object can be extracted from the translation module, and we show that the resonator can be designed to track multiple moving objects with precision of a few pixels.
title Generalized multi-object classification and tracking with sparse feature resonator networks
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22539