Reconstruction-Guided Slot Curriculum: Addressing Object Over-Fragmentation in Video Object-Centric Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Moon, WonJun, Seong, Hyun Seok, Heo, Jae-Pil
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Moon, WonJun
Seong, Hyun Seok
Heo, Jae-Pil
author_facet Moon, WonJun
Seong, Hyun Seok
Heo, Jae-Pil
contents Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22758
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reconstruction-Guided Slot Curriculum: Addressing Object Over-Fragmentation in Video Object-Centric Learning
Moon, WonJun
Seong, Hyun Seok
Heo, Jae-Pil
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.
title Reconstruction-Guided Slot Curriculum: Addressing Object Over-Fragmentation in Video Object-Centric Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22758