Unsupervised Causal Generative Understanding of Images

Anciukevicius, T., Fox-Roberts, P., Rosten, E. and Henderson, P. (2023) Unsupervised Causal Generative Understanding of Images. In: 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), 28th November - 9th December 2022, ISBN 9781713871088

Abstract

We present a novel framework for unsupervised object-centric 3D scene understanding that generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution images. To achieve this, we design a causal generative model reflecting the physical process by which an image is produced, when a camera captures a scene containing multiple objects. This model is trained to reconstruct multi-view images via a latent representation describing the shapes, colours and positions of the 3D objects they show. It explicitly represents object instances as separate neural radiance fields, placed into a 3D scene. We then propose an inference algorithm that can infer this latent representation given a single out-of-distribution image as input -- even when it shows an unseen combination of components, unseen spatial compositions or a radically new viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments applying our approach to test datasets that have zero probability under the training distribution. These show that it accurately reconstructs a scene's geometry, segments objects and infers their positions, despite not receiving any supervision. Our approach significantly out-performs baselines that do not capture the true causal image generation process.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Henderson, Dr Paul
• Authors: Anciukevicius, T., Fox-Roberts, P., Rosten, E., and Henderson, P.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISBN: 9781713871088
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © The Author(s) 2022
• First Published: First published in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022)
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy

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