Title
SCAN: Learning Hierarchical Compositional Visual Concepts
Abstract
The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
international conference on learning representations
Tree traversal,Abstraction,Symbol,Inference,Theoretical computer science,Artificial intelligence,Hierarchy,Physical law,Small set,Mathematics,Machine learning,Generative model
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
5
0.40
References 
Authors
0
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Irina Higgins124511.95
Nicolas Sonnerat2643.33
Loïc Matthey323910.16
Arka Pal42217.85
Christopher Burgess52369.62
Matko Bosnjak6686.52
murray shanahan7102387.33
Matthew M Botvinick849425.34
Demis Hassabis94924191.12
Alexander Lerchner1025611.70