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Jack Brady

5 accepted papers

2026

Generation is Required for Data-Efficient Perception

ICML 2026poster

It has been hypothesized that human-level visual perception requires a generative approach in which internal representations result from inverting a decoder. Yet today’s most successful vision models are non-generative, relying on an encoder that maps images to representations without decoder invers…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions

ICLR 2025poster

Learning disentangled representations of concepts and re-composing them in unseen ways is crucial for generalizing to out-of-domain situations. However, the underlying properties of concepts that enable such disentanglement and compositional generalization remain poorly understood. In this work, we…

2024

Provable Compositional Generalization for Object-Centric Learning

ICLR 2024oral

Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, which are widely conjectured to enable compositional generalization. Yet, it remains…

2023

Provably Learning Object-Centric Representations

ICML 2023oral

Learning structured representations of the visual world in terms of objects promises to significantly improve the generalization abilities of current machine learning models. While recent efforts to this end have shown promising empirical progress, a theoretical account of when unsupervised object-c…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2022

Embrace the Gap: VAEs Perform Independent Mechanism Analysis

NeurIPS 2022accept

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact (log-)marginal likelihood. While VAEs are commonly used for r…