Inductive Biases for Object-Centric Representations in the Presence of Complex Textures

Understanding which inductive biases could be helpful for the unsupervised learning of object-centric representations of natural scenes is challenging. In this paper, we use neural style transfer to generate datasets where objects have complex textures while still retaining ground-truth annotations. We find that methods that use a single module to reconstruct both the shape and visual appearance of each object learn more useful representations and achieve better object separation. In addition, we observe that adjusting the latent space size is insufficient to improve segmentation performance. Finally, the downstream usefulness of the representations is significantly more strongly correlated with segmentation quality than with reconstruction accuracy.