2025/03/27 by Didolkar, Aniket, Zadaianchuk, Andrii, Awal, Rabiul +3 · 3 citations
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.21747
Object-centric representation learning aims to decompose visual scenes into fixed-size vectors called "slots" or "object files", where each slot captures a distinct object. Current state-of-the-art object-centric models have shown remarkable success in object discovery in diverse domains, including complex real-world scenes. However, these models suffer from a key limitation: they lack controllability. Specifically, current object-centric models learn representations based on their preconceived understanding of objects, without allowing user input to guide which objects are represented. Introducing controllability into object-centric models could unlock a range of useful capabilities, such as the ability to extract instance-specific representations from a scene. In this work, we propose a novel approach for user-directed control over slot representations by conditioning slots on language descriptions. The proposed ConTRoLlable Object-centric representation learning approach, which we term CTRL-O, achieves targeted object-language binding in complex real-world scenes without requiring mask supervision. Next, we apply these controllable slot representations on two downstream vision language tasks: text-to-image generation and visual question answering. The proposed approach enables instance-specific text-to-image generation and also achieves strong performance on visual question answering.