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ContextFusion and Bootstrap: An Effective Approach to Improve Slot Attention-Based Object-Centric Learning

delete2026-08-12
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PRE
AI
P
Pinzhuo Tian *
S
Shengjie Yang
H
Hang Yu *
A
Alex C. Kot
B
Bihan Wen
DOI:10.1007/s11263-026-02964-3delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
A key human ability is to decompose a scene into distinct objects and use their relationships to understand the environment. Object-centric learning aims to mimic this process in an unsupervised manner. Recently, the slot attention-based framework has emerged as a leading approach in this area and has been widely used in various downstream tasks. However, existing slot attention methods face two key limitations: (1) a lack of semantic information. In current methods, image areas are assigned to slots based on low-level features such as color and texture. This makes the model overly sensitive to low-level features and limits its understanding of object contours, shapes, or other semantic characteristics. (2) inability to fine-tune the encoder during training. Current methods require a stable feature space throughout training to enable reconstruction from slots, which restricts the flexibility needed for effective object-centric learning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel ContextFusion stage and a Bootstrap Branch, both of which can be seamlessly integrated into existing slot attention models. In the ContextFusion stage, we exploit semantic information from the foreground and background, incorporating an auxiliary indicator that provides additional contextual cues about them to enrich the semantic content beyond low-level features. In the Bootstrap Branch, we decouple feature adaptation from the original reconstruction phase and introduce a bootstrap strategy to train a feature-adaptive mechanism, allowing for more flexible adaptation. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance of different SOTA slot attention models on both simulated and real-world datasets.
Keywords:
Object-centric learning
Slot attention
Contrastive learning
Bootstrap

Journal

International Journal of Computer Vision cover
International Journal of Computer Vision
IF:
9.3
Papers:
3.9K
Citations:
2.8W

Organization

S
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Scholars:
260
Papers: 110
Citations: 3
S
school of computer engineering and science
Scholars:
54
Papers: 20
Citations: 0
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