Papers › Learning What and Where: Disentangling Location and Identity Tracking Without Supervision
Learning What and Where: Disentangling Location and Identity Tracking Without Supervision
Manuel Traub, Sebastian Otte, Tobias Menge, Matthias Karlbauer, Jannik Thümmel, Martin V. Butz
Our brain can almost effortlessly decompose visual data streams into background and salient objects. Moreover, it can anticipate object motion and interactions, which are crucial abilities for conceptual planning and reasoning. Recent object reasoning datasets, such as CATER, have revealed fundamental shortcomings of current vision-based AI systems, particularly when targeting explicit object representations, object permanence, and object reasoning. Here we introduce a self-supervised LOCation and Identity tracking system (Loci), which excels on the CATER tracking challenge. Inspired by the dorsal and ventral pathways in the brain, Loci tackles the binding problem by processing separate, slot-wise encodings of `what' and `where'. Loci's predictive coding-like processing encourages active error minimization, such that individual slots tend to encode individual objects. Interactions between objects and object dynamics are processed in the disentangled latent space. Truncated backpropagation through time combined with forward eligibility accumulation significantly speeds up learning and improves memory efficiency. Besides exhibiting superior performance in current benchmarks, Loci effectively extracts objects from video streams and separates them into location and Gestalt components. We believe that this separation offers a representation that will facilitate effective planning and reasoning on conceptual levels.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video Object Tracking | CATER | Loci | L1 | 0.14 | #1 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Video Object Tracking | CATER | Loci | Top 1 Accuracy | 90.7 | #1 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Video Object Tracking | CATER | Loci | Top 5 Accuracy | 98.5 | #1 of 7 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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