Papers › Object Representations as Fixed Points: Training Iterative Refinement Algorithms with...
Object Representations as Fixed Points: Training Iterative Refinement Algorithms with Implicit Differentiation
Michael Chang, Thomas L. Griffiths, Sergey Levine
Iterative refinement -- start with a random guess, then iteratively improve the guess -- is a useful paradigm for representation learning because it offers a way to break symmetries among equally plausible explanations for the data. This property enables the application of such methods to infer representations of sets of entities, such as objects in physical scenes, structurally resembling clustering algorithms in latent space. However, most prior works differentiate through the unrolled refinement process, which can make optimization challenging. We observe that such methods can be made differentiable by means of the implicit function theorem, and develop an implicit differentiation approach that improves the stability and tractability of training by decoupling the forward and backward passes. This connection enables us to apply advances in optimizing implicit layers to not only improve the optimization of the slot attention module in SLATE, a state-of-the-art method for learning entity representations, but do so with constant space and time complexity in backpropagation and only one additional line of code.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections