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Thomas Kipf

25 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

Direct Motion Models for Assessing Generated Videos

ICML 2025poster

A current limitation of video generative video models is that they generate plausible looking frames, but poor motion --- an issue that is not well captured by FVD and other popular methods for evaluating generated videos. Here we go beyond FVD by developing a metric which better measures plausible…

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

DORSal: Diffusion for Object-centric Representations of Scenes $\textit{et al.}$

ICLR 2024poster

Recent progress in 3D scene understanding enables scalable learning of representations across large datasets of diverse scenes. As a consequence, generalization to unseen scenes and objects, rendering novel views from just a single or a handful of input images, and controllable scene generation that…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DyST: Towards Dynamic Neural Scene Representations on Real-World Videos

ICLR 2024spotlight

Visual understanding of the world goes beyond the semantics and flat structure of individual images. In this work, we aim to capture both the 3D structure and dynamics of real-world scenes from monocular real-world videos. Our Dynamic Scene Transformer (DyST) model leverages recent work in neural sc…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning 3D Particle-based Simulators from RGB-D Videos

ICLR 2024poster

Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Moving Off-the-Grid: Scene-Grounded Video Representations

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Current vision models typically maintain a fixed correspondence between their representation structure and image space. Each layer comprises a set of tokens arranged “on-the-grid,” which biases patches or tokens to encode information at a specific spatio(-temporal) location. In this work we present…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Neural Assets: 3D-Aware Multi-Object Scene Synthesis with Image Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We address the problem of multi-object 3D pose control in image diffusion models. Instead of conditioning on a sequence of text tokens, we propose to use a set of per-object representations, *Neural Assets*, to control the 3D pose of individual objects in a scene. Neural Assets are obtained by pooli…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

SceneCraft: An LLM Agent for Synthesizing 3D Scenes as Blender Code

ICML 2024oral

This paper introduces SceneCraft, a Large Language Model (LLM) Agent converting text descriptions into Blender-executable Python scripts which render complex scenes with up to a hundred 3D assets. This process requires complex spatial planning and arrangement. We tackle these challenges through a co…

Cited by 39SourcePDFScholar
2023

Invariant Slot Attention: Object Discovery with Slot-Centric Reference Frames

ICML 2023poster

Automatically discovering composable abstractions from raw perceptual data is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. Recent slot-based neural networks that learn about objects in a self-supervised manner have made exciting progress in this direction. However, they typically fall short at ade…

2023

One-shot Imitation Learning via Interaction Warping

CoRL 2023poster

Learning robot policies from few demonstrations is crucial in open-ended applications. We propose a new method, Interaction Warping, for one-shot learning SE(3) robotic manipulation policies. We infer the 3D mesh of each object in the environment using shape warping, a technique for aligning point c…

Cited by 13SourcecodeScholar
2023

RUST: Latent Neural Scene Representations From Unposed Imagery

CVPR 2023highlight

Inferring the structure of 3D scenes from 2D observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recently popularized approaches based on neural scene representations have achieved tremendous impact and have been applied across a variety of applications. One of the major remaining challenges…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2023

Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters

ICML 2023oral

The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models. At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters. Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modelling, but these have not yet been suc…

Cited by 650SourcePDFScholar
2023

SlotFormer: Unsupervised Visual Dynamics Simulation with Object-Centric Models

ICLR 2023poster

Understanding dynamics from visual observations is a challenging problem that requires disentangling individual objects from the scene and learning their interactions. While recent object-centric models can successfully decompose a scene into objects, modeling their dynamics effectively still remain…

2023

Test-time Adaptation with Slot-Centric Models

ICML 2023poster

Current visual detectors, though impressive within their training distribution, often fail to parse out-of-distribution scenes into their constituent entities. Recent test-time adaptation methods use auxiliary self-supervised losses to adapt the network parameters to each test example independently…

2023

Video OWL-ViT: Temporally-consistent Open-world Localization in Video

ICCV 2023poster

We present an architecture and a training recipe that adapts pretrained open-world image models to localization in videos. Understanding the open visual world (without being constrained by fixed label spaces) is crucial for many real-world vision tasks. Contrastive pre-training on large image-text d…

Cited by 17PDFScholar
2022

Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video

ICLR 2022poster

Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment an…

2022

Kubric: A Scalable Dataset Generator

CVPR 2022poster

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises a…

Cited by 249PDFcodeScholar
2022

Object Scene Representation Transformer

NeurIPS 2022accept

A compositional understanding of the world in terms of objects and their geometry in 3D space is considered a cornerstone of human cognition. Facilitating the learning of such a representation in neural networks holds promise for substantially improving labeled data efficiency. As a key step in this…

Cited by 116SourcePDFScholar
2022

SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos

NeurIPS 2022accept

The visual world can be parsimoniously characterized in terms of distinct entities with sparse interactions. Discovering this compositional structure in dynamic visual scenes has proven challenging for end-to-end computer vision approaches unless explicit instance-level supervision is provided. Slot…

Cited by 154SourcePDFScholar
2022

Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers

ECCV 2022poster

"Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively sca…

2020

Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In…

2019

CompILE: Compositional Imitation Learning and Execution

ICML 2019oral

We introduce Compositional Imitation Learning and Execution (CompILE): a framework for learning reusable, variable-length segments of hierarchically-structured behavior from demonstration data. CompILE uses a novel unsupervised, fully-differentiable sequence segmentation module to learn latent encod…

2018

Neural Relational Inference for Interacting Systems

ICML 2018oral

Interacting systems are prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in physics to complex societal dynamics. The interplay of components can give rise to complex behavior, which can often be explained using a simple model of the system’s constituent parts. In this work, we introduce the neural relat…