Unsupervised Causal Generative Understanding of ImagesDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 16 Oct 2022NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: unsupervised learning, generative models, object centric models, out-of-distribution generalization, domain shift, causality
Abstract: We present a novel framework for unsupervised object-centric 3D scene understanding that generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution images. To achieve this, we design a causal generative model reflecting the physical process by which an image is produced, when a camera captures a scene containing multiple objects. This model is trained to reconstruct multi-view images via a latent representation describing the shapes, colours and positions of the 3D objects they show. It explicitly represents object instances as separate neural radiance fields, placed into a 3D scene. We then propose an inference algorithm that can infer this latent representation given a single out-of-distribution image as input -- even when it shows an unseen combination of components, unseen spatial compositions or a radically new viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments applying our approach to test datasets that have zero probability under the training distribution. These show that it accurately reconstructs a scene's geometry, segments objects and infers their positions, despite not receiving any supervision. Our approach significantly out-performs baselines that do not capture the true causal image generation process.
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TL;DR: A framework for unsupervised object-centric 3D scene understanding that generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution images.
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