# Identifiable Object-Centric Representation Learning via Probabilistic Slot Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [MONet: Unsupervised Scene Decomposition and Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11390/) (2019)
- [Multi-Object Representation Learning with Iterative Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00450/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentations Provably Isolates Content from Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04619/) (2021)
- [Nonlinear ICA Using Auxiliary Variables and Generalized Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08651/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Feature Extraction by Time-Contrastive Learning and Nonlinear ICA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06336/) (2016)
- [VAE with a VampPrior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07120/) (2017)
- [Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12594/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Disentanglement Without Compromises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02886/) (2020)
- [On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05208/) (2020)
- [GENESIS: Generative Scene Inference and Sampling with Object-Centric Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13052/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08850/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Clustering with Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02648/) (2016)
- [Bridging the Gap to Real-World Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14860/) (2022)
- [SPACE: Unsupervised Object-Oriented Scene Representation via Spatial Attention and Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02407/) (2020)
- [Tell Me Where to Look: Guided Attention Inference Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10171/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Interventional Causal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11924/) (2022)
- [Weakly supervised causal representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16437/) (2022)
- [Simple Unsupervised Object-Centric Learning for Complex and Naturalistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14065/) (2022)
- [How to represent part-whole hierarchies in a neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12627/) (2021)
- [Deep Convolutional Inverse Graphics Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03167/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07784/) (2024)
- [MetaSlot: Break Through the Fixed Number of Slots in Object-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20772/) (2025)
- [Slot-BERT: Self-supervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12477/) (2025)
- [unMORE: Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation via Center-Boundary Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01778/) (2025)
- [Diverse Influence Component Analysis: A Geometric Approach to Nonlinear Mixture Identifiability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17040/) (2025)
- [Neurosymbolic Object-Centric Learning with Distant Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16129/) (2025)
- [Not all solutions are created equal: An analytical dissociation of functional and representational similarity in deep linear neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38998/) (2026)
- [Transparent Visual Reasoning via Object-Centric Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23757/) (2025)
- [Entity-Centric World Models: Interaction-Aware Masking for Causal Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15466/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning modular object-centric representations is crucial for systematic generalization. Existing methods show promising object-binding capabilities empirically, but theoretical identifiability guarantees remain relatively underdeveloped. Understanding when object-centric representations can theoretically be identified is crucial for scaling slot-based methods to high-dimensional images with correctness guarantees. To that end, we propose a probabilistic slot-attention algorithm that imposes an aggregate mixture prior over object-centric slot representations, thereby providing slot identifiability guarantees without supervision, up to an equivalence relation. We provide empirical verification of our theoretical identifiability result using both simple 2-dimensional data and high-resolution imaging datasets.