Slot Abstractors: Toward Scalable Abstract Visual Reasoning

Shanka Subhra Mondal, Jonathan D. Cohen, Taylor Whittington Webb
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 235:36088-36105, 2024.

Abstract

Abstract visual reasoning is a characteristically human ability, allowing the identification of relational patterns that are abstracted away from object features, and the systematic generalization of those patterns to unseen problems. Recent work has demonstrated strong systematic generalization in visual reasoning tasks involving multi-object inputs, through the integration of slot-based methods used for extracting object-centric representations coupled with strong inductive biases for relational abstraction. However, this approach was limited to problems containing a single rule, and was not scalable to visual reasoning problems containing a large number of objects. Other recent work proposed Abstractors, an extension of Transformers that incorporates strong relational inductive biases, thereby inheriting the Transformer’s scalability and multi-head architecture, but it has yet to be demonstrated how this approach might be applied to multi-object visual inputs. Here we combine the strengths of the above approaches and propose Slot Abstractors, an approach to abstract visual reasoning that can be scaled to problems involving a large number of objects and multiple relations among them. The approach displays state-of-the-art performance across four abstract visual reasoning tasks, as well as an abstract reasoning task involving real-world images.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v235-mondal24a, title = {Slot Abstractors: Toward Scalable Abstract Visual Reasoning}, author = {Mondal, Shanka Subhra and Cohen, Jonathan D. and Webb, Taylor Whittington}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {36088--36105}, year = {2024}, editor = {Salakhutdinov, Ruslan and Kolter, Zico and Heller, Katherine and Weller, Adrian and Oliver, Nuria and Scarlett, Jonathan and Berkenkamp, Felix}, volume = {235}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {21--27 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v235/main/assets/mondal24a/mondal24a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/mondal24a.html}, abstract = {Abstract visual reasoning is a characteristically human ability, allowing the identification of relational patterns that are abstracted away from object features, and the systematic generalization of those patterns to unseen problems. Recent work has demonstrated strong systematic generalization in visual reasoning tasks involving multi-object inputs, through the integration of slot-based methods used for extracting object-centric representations coupled with strong inductive biases for relational abstraction. However, this approach was limited to problems containing a single rule, and was not scalable to visual reasoning problems containing a large number of objects. Other recent work proposed Abstractors, an extension of Transformers that incorporates strong relational inductive biases, thereby inheriting the Transformer’s scalability and multi-head architecture, but it has yet to be demonstrated how this approach might be applied to multi-object visual inputs. Here we combine the strengths of the above approaches and propose Slot Abstractors, an approach to abstract visual reasoning that can be scaled to problems involving a large number of objects and multiple relations among them. The approach displays state-of-the-art performance across four abstract visual reasoning tasks, as well as an abstract reasoning task involving real-world images.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Slot Abstractors: Toward Scalable Abstract Visual Reasoning %A Shanka Subhra Mondal %A Jonathan D. Cohen %A Taylor Whittington Webb %B Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2024 %E Ruslan Salakhutdinov %E Zico Kolter %E Katherine Heller %E Adrian Weller %E Nuria Oliver %E Jonathan Scarlett %E Felix Berkenkamp %F pmlr-v235-mondal24a %I PMLR %P 36088--36105 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/mondal24a.html %V 235 %X Abstract visual reasoning is a characteristically human ability, allowing the identification of relational patterns that are abstracted away from object features, and the systematic generalization of those patterns to unseen problems. Recent work has demonstrated strong systematic generalization in visual reasoning tasks involving multi-object inputs, through the integration of slot-based methods used for extracting object-centric representations coupled with strong inductive biases for relational abstraction. However, this approach was limited to problems containing a single rule, and was not scalable to visual reasoning problems containing a large number of objects. Other recent work proposed Abstractors, an extension of Transformers that incorporates strong relational inductive biases, thereby inheriting the Transformer’s scalability and multi-head architecture, but it has yet to be demonstrated how this approach might be applied to multi-object visual inputs. Here we combine the strengths of the above approaches and propose Slot Abstractors, an approach to abstract visual reasoning that can be scaled to problems involving a large number of objects and multiple relations among them. The approach displays state-of-the-art performance across four abstract visual reasoning tasks, as well as an abstract reasoning task involving real-world images.
APA
Mondal, S.S., Cohen, J.D. & Webb, T.W.. (2024). Slot Abstractors: Toward Scalable Abstract Visual Reasoning. Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 235:36088-36105 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/mondal24a.html.

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