# Reasoning-Enhanced Object-Centric Learning for Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15245 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15245/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 49 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Interaction Networks for Learning about Objects, Relations and Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00222/) (2016)
- [MONet: Unsupervised Scene Decomposition and Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11390/) (2019)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12594/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning of Structured World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12247/) (2019)
- [SAVi++: Towards End-to-End Object-Centric Learning from Real-World Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07764/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation by Motion Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07658/) (2021)
- [Illiterate DALL-E Learns to Compose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11405/) (2021)
- [SlotFormer: Unsupervised Visual Dynamics Simulation with Object-Centric Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05861/) (2022)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [Sequential Attend, Infer, Repeat: Generative Modelling of Moving Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01794/) (2018)
- [A Compositional Object-Based Approach to Learning Physical Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00341/) (2016)
- [Spatial Broadcast Decoder: A Simple Architecture for Learning Disentangled Representations in VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07017/) (2019)
- [Entity Abstraction in Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12827/) (2019)
- [SCALOR: Generative World Models with Scalable Object Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02384/) (2019)
- [STAN: Spatio-Temporal Attention Network for Next Location Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04095/) (2021)
- [Visual Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01433/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14353/) (2020)
- [Generalization and Robustness Implications in Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00637/) (2021)
- [Improving Generative Imagination in Object-Centric World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02054/) (2020)
- [SIMONe: View-Invariant, Temporally-Abstracted Object Representations via Unsupervised Video Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03849/) (2021)
- [Grounding Physical Concepts of Objects and Events Through Dynamic Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16564/) (2021)
- [When Physics Meets Machine Learning: A Survey of Physics-Informed Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16797/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Temporally Consistent Object-Centric Learning by Contrasting Slots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14295/) (2024)
- [Predicting Video Slot Attention Queries from Random Slot-Feature Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01345/) (2025)
- [Smoothing Slot Attention Iterations and Recurrences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05417/) (2025)
- [SlotPi: Physics-informed Object-centric Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10778/) (2025)
- [Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04978/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Temporal Consistency in Video Object-Centric Learning: From Prediction to Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03650/) (2026)
- [iSEE: Object Permanence Through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01201/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object-centric learning aims to break down complex visual scenes into more manageable object representations, enhancing the understanding and reasoning abilities of machine learning systems toward the physical world. Recently, slot-based video models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in segmenting and tracking objects, but they overlook the importance of the effective reasoning module. In the real world, reasoning and predictive abilities play a crucial role in human perception and object tracking; in particular, these abilities are closely related to human intuitive physics. Inspired by this, we designed a novel reasoning module called the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer with Memory buffer (STATM) to enhance the model's perception ability in complex scenes. The memory buffer primarily serves as storage for slot information from upstream modules, the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer makes predictions through slot-based spatiotemporal attention computations and fusion. Our experimental results on various datasets indicate that the STATM module can significantly enhance the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art object-centric learning models for video. Moreover, as a predictive model, the STATM module also performs well in downstream prediction and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/STATM.
