Object-centric world models provide structured representation of the scene and can be an important backbone in reinforcement learning and planning. However, existing approaches suffer in partially-observable environments due to the lack of belief states. In this paper, we propose Structured World Belief, a model for learning and inference of object-centric belief states. Inferred by Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), our belief states provide multiple object-centric scene hypotheses. To synergize the benefits of SMC particles with object representations, we also propose a new object-centric dynamics model that considers the inductive bias of object permanence. This enables tracking of object states even when they are invisible for a long time. To further facilitate object tracking in this regime, we allow our model to attend flexibly to any spatial location in the image which was restricted in previous models. In experiments, we show that object-centric belief provides a more accurate and robust performance for filtering and generation. Furthermore, we show the efficacy of structured world belief in improving the performance of reinforcement learning, planning and supervised reasoning.

We introduce a detection framework for dense crowd counting and eliminate the need for the prevalent density regression paradigm. Typical counting models predict crowd density for an image as opposed to detecting every person. These regression methods, in general, fail to localize persons accurate enough for most applications other than counting. Hence, we adopt an architecture that locates every person in the crowd, sizes the spotted heads with bounding box and then counts them. Compared to normal object or face detectors, there exist certain unique challenges in designing such a detection system. Some of them are direct consequences of the huge diversity in dense crowds along with the need to predict boxes contiguously. We solve these issues and develop our LSC-CNN model, which can reliably detect heads of people across sparse to dense crowds. LSC-CNN employs a multi-column architecture with top-down feature modulation to better resolve persons and produce refined predictions at multiple resolutions. Interestingly, the proposed training regime requires only point head annotation, but can estimate approximate size information of heads. We show that LSC-CNN not only has superior localization than existing density regressors, but outperforms in counting as well. The code for our approach is available at https://github.com/val-iisc/lsc-cnn.

The remarkable recent advances in object-centric generative world models raise a few questions. First, while many of the recent achievements are indispensable for making a general and versatile world model, it is quite unclear how these ingredients can be integrated into a unified framework. Second, despite using generative objectives, abilities for object detection and tracking are mainly investigated, leaving the crucial ability of temporal imagination largely under question. Third, a few key abilities for more faithful temporal imagination such as multimodal uncertainty and situation-awareness are missing. In this paper, we introduce Generative Structured World Models (G-SWM). The G-SWM achieves the versatile world modeling not only by unifying the key properties of previous models in a principled framework but also by achieving two crucial new abilities, multimodal uncertainty and situation-awareness. Our thorough investigation on the temporal generation ability in comparison to the previous models demonstrates that G-SWM achieves the versatility with the best or comparable performance for all experiment settings including a few complex settings that have not been tested before. https://sites.google.com/view/gswm

We present an alternative to the paradigm of density regression widely being employed for tackling crowd counting. In the prevalent regression approach, a model is trained for mapping images to its crowd density rather than counting by detecting every person. This framework is motivated from the difficulty to discriminate humans in highly dense crowds where unfavorable perspective, occlusion and clutter are prevalent. Though regression methods estimate overall crowd counts pretty well, localization of individual persons suffers and varies considerably across the entire density spectrum. Moreover, individual detection of people aids more explainable practical systems than predicting blind crowd count or density map. Hence, we move away from density regression and reformulate the task as localized dot prediction in dense crowds. Our dot detection model, DD-CNN, is trained for pixel-wise binary classification to detect people instead of regressing local crowd density. In order to handle severe scale variation and detect people of all scales with accurate dots, we use a novel multi-scale architecture which does not require any ground truth scale information. This training regime, which incorporates top-down feedback, helps our model to localize people in sparse as well as dense crowds. Our model delivers superior counting performance on major crowd datasets. We also evaluate on some additional metrics and evidence superior localization of the dot detection formulation.

Learning from different modalities is a challenging task. In this paper, we look at the challenging problem of cross modal face verification and recognition between caricature and visual image modalities. Caricature have exaggerations of facial features of a person. Due to the significant variations in the caricatures, building vision models for recognizing and verifying data from this modality is an extremely challenging task. Visual images with significantly lesser amount of distortions can act as a bridge for the analysis of caricature modality. We introduce a publicly available large Caricature-VIsual dataset [CaVI] with images from both the modalities that captures the rich variations in the caricature of an identity. This paper presents the first cross modal architecture that handles extreme distortions of caricatures using a deep learning network that learns similar representations across the modalities. We use two convolutional networks along with transformations that are subjected to orthogonality constraints to capture the shared and modality specific representations. In contrast to prior research, our approach neither depends on manually extracted facial landmarks for learning the representations, nor on the identities of the person for performing verification. The learned shared representation achieves 91% accuracy for verifying unseen images and 75% accuracy on unseen identities. Further, recognizing the identity in the image by knowledge transfer using a combination of shared and modality specific representations, resulted in an unprecedented performance of 85% rank-1 accuracy for caricatures and 95% rank-1 accuracy for visual images.