Looping LOCI: Developing Object Permanence from Videos

Recent compositional scene representation learning models have become remarkably good in segmenting and tracking distinct objects within visual scenes. Yet, many of these models require that objects are continuously, at least partially, visible. Moreover, they tend to fail on intuitive physics tests, which infants learn to solve over the first months of their life. Our goal is to advance compositional scene representation algorithms with an embedded algorithm that fosters the progressive learning of intuitive physics, akin to infant development. As a fundamental component for such an algorithm, we introduce Loci-Looped, which advances a recently published unsupervised object location, identification, and tracking neural network architecture (Loci, Traub et al., ICLR 2023) with an internal processing loop. The loop is designed to adaptively blend pixel-space information with anticipations yielding information-fused activities as percepts. Moreover, it is designed to learn compositional representations of both individual object dynamics and between-objects interaction dynamics. We show that Loci-Looped learns to track objects through extended periods of object occlusions, indeed simulating their hidden trajectories and anticipating their reappearance, without the need for an explicit history buffer. We even find that Loci-Looped surpasses state-of-the-art models on the ADEPT and the CLEVRER dataset, when confronted with object occlusions or temporary sensory data interruptions. This indicates that Loci-Looped is able to learn the physical concepts of object permanence and inertia in a fully unsupervised emergent manner. We believe that even further architectural advancements of the internal loop - also in other compositional scene representation learning models - can be developed in the near future.