# Neural Expectation Maximization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03498 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03498/

## Key facts

- Cited by 123 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 123)

- [Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12594/) (2021)
- [SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07764/) (2022)
- [Illiterate DALL-E Learns to Compose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11405/) (2021)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01209/) (2021)
- [GENESIS-V2: Inferring Unordered Object Representations without Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09958/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Discovery of Object Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07905/) (2021)
- [ClevrTex: A Texture-Rich Benchmark for Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10265/) (2021)
- [Object-Centric Slot Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10834/) (2023)
- [Decomposing 3D Scenes into Objects via Unsupervised Volume Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01148/) (2021)
- [SlotDiffusion: Object-Centric Generative Modeling with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11281/) (2023)
- [Generalization and Robustness Implications in Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00637/) (2021)
- [Object-Centric Learning for Real-World Videos by Predicting Temporal Feature Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04829/) (2023)
- [Is Attention Better Than Matrix Decomposition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04553/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Compositional Energy Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03042/) (2021)
- [MG-GAN: A Multi-Generator Model Preventing Out-of-Distribution Samples in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09274/) (2021)
- [Improving Object-centric Learning with Query Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08990/) (2022)
- [Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02598/) (2023)
- [Invariant Slot Attention: Object Discovery with Slot-Centric Reference Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04973/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Layered Image Decomposition into Object Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14575/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Object-Centric Learning for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06907/) (2023)
- [Object Representations as Fixed Points: Training Iterative Refinement Algorithms with Implicit Differentiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00787/) (2022)
- [Provably Learning Object-Centric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14229/) (2023)
- [Complex-Valued Autoencoders for Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02075/) (2022)
- [Learning Object-Centric Representations of Multi-Object Scenes from Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07117/) (2021)
- [Neural Systematic Binder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01177/) (2022)
- [Efficient Iterative Amortized Inference for Learning Symmetric and Disentangled Multi-Object Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03630/) (2021)
- [PartAfford: Part-level Affordance Discovery from 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13519/) (2022)
- [Single Image Depth Estimation: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06456/) (2021)
- [EM-driven unsupervised learning for efficient motion segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02074/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many real world tasks such as reasoning and physical interaction require identification and manipulation of conceptual entities. A first step towards solving these tasks is the automated discovery of distributed symbol-like representations. In this paper, we explicitly formalize this problem as inference in a spatial mixture model where each component is parametrized by a neural network. Based on the Expectation Maximization framework we then derive a differentiable clustering method that simultaneously learns how to group and represent individual entities. We evaluate our method on the (sequential) perceptual grouping task and find that it is able to accurately recover the constituent objects. We demonstrate that the learned representations are useful for next-step prediction.