Masked Multi-Query Slot Attention for Unsupervised Object Discovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a masked multi-query slot attention method for unsupervised object discovery that improves object localization by focusing on salient regions and learning multiple slot sets, tested on PASCAL-VOC 2012.

Contribution

It proposes a novel masking scheme and multi-query slot attention extension that enhance unsupervised object discovery performance.

Findings

Improved object localization accuracy on PASCAL-VOC 2012.

Masking background regions enhances focus on salient objects.

Multi-query approach yields more stable and accurate masks.

Abstract

Unsupervised object discovery is becoming an essential line of research for tackling recognition problems that require decomposing an image into entities, such as semantic segmentation and object detection. Recently, object-centric methods that leverage self-supervision have gained popularity, due to their simplicity and adaptability to different settings and conditions. However, those methods do not exploit effective techniques already employed in modern self-supervised approaches. In this work, we consider an object-centric approach in which DINO ViT features are reconstructed via a set of queried representations called slots. Based on that, we propose a masking scheme on input features that selectively disregards the background regions, inducing our model to focus more on salient objects during the reconstruction phase. Moreover, we extend the slot attention to a multi-query approach, allowing the model to learn multiple sets of slots, producing more stable masks. During training, these multiple sets of slots are learned independently while, at test time, these sets are merged through Hungarian matching to obtain the final slots. Our experimental results and ablations on the PASCAL-VOC 2012 dataset show the importance of each component and highlight how their combination consistently improves object localization. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/rishavpramanik/maskedmultiqueryslot