Token Bottleneck: One Token to Remember Dynamics

TL;DR

Token Bottleneck (ToBo) is a self-supervised learning method that encodes dynamic scenes into a compact token to predict future scenes, capturing temporal dependencies for tasks like video propagation and robotic manipulation.

Contribution

Introduces ToBo, a novel self-supervised pipeline that learns compact, temporally aware scene representations using minimal scene hints, improving dynamic scene understanding.

Findings

Outperforms baselines in video label propagation and robot manipulation tasks

Demonstrates robustness and effectiveness in real-world robotic experiments

Scalable across different model sizes

Abstract

Deriving compact and temporally aware visual representations from dynamic scenes is essential for successful execution of sequential scene understanding tasks such as visual tracking and robotic manipulation. In this paper, we introduce Token Bottleneck (ToBo), a simple yet intuitive self-supervised learning pipeline that squeezes a scene into a bottleneck token and predicts the subsequent scene using minimal patches as hints. The ToBo pipeline facilitates the learning of sequential scene representations by conservatively encoding the reference scene into a compact bottleneck token during the squeeze step. In the reconstruction step, we guide the model to capture temporal dynamics by predicting the target scene using the bottleneck token along with few target patches as hints. This design encourages the vision backbone to embed temporal dependencies, thereby enabling understanding of dynamic transitions across scenes. Extensive experiments in diverse sequential tasks, including video label propagation and robot manipulation in simulated environments demonstrate the superiority of \ours~over baselines. Moreover, deploying our pre-trained model on physical robots confirms its robustness and effectiveness in real-world environments. We further validate the scalability of ToBo across different model scales. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/tobo.