Hierarchical clustering attention for unsupervised object-centric representation learning

Extracting object-centric representations from a complex multi-object scene is indeed a crucial milestone for modern neural network architectures to achieve near human level cognition capabilities. Nevertheless, most of the contemporary neural networks that address object-centric representation learning problem require apriori initialization of a fixed set of object describing vectors or cannot manage to handle images of higher resolution. Contrary to long-standing paradigms in the literature, this work proposes Query Breaking Visual Attention (QBVA) module, an efficient and effective building block that introduces a divide and conquer strategy to object-centric representation learning while solving the unsupervised scene segmentation task. QBVA is essentially a stand-alone attention based clustering module that is capable of extracting object-centric representations from a multi-object scene when cascaded into a hierarchical network architecture. QBVA leverages a novel, fully differentiable and non-parametric clustering scheme named Query-Breaking Clustering (QBC) which eliminates the need for initializing a fixed set of clusters and holds the promise to provide dynamic representation for a variable number of objects. We demonstrate that QBVA-Net is indeed a competitive approach to address object-centric representation learning paradigm and prove to be advantageous compared to the state-of-the-art in the sense that it can provide better segmentation performance at the end of the encoder network and theoretically scale up to images of higher resolution.