In this work, we propose Asynchronous Perception Machine (APM), a computationally-efficient architecture for test-time-training (TTT). APM can process patches of an image one at a time in any order asymmetrically and still encode semantic-awareness in the net. We demonstrate APM's ability to recognize out-of-distribution images without dataset-specific pre-training, augmentation or any-pretext task. APM offers competitive performance over existing TTT approaches. To perform TTT, APM just distills test sample's representation once. APM possesses a unique property: it can learn using just this single representation and starts predicting semantically-aware features. APM demostrates potential applications beyond test-time-training: APM can scale up to a dataset of 2D images and yield semantic-clusterings in a single forward pass. APM also provides first empirical evidence towards validating GLOM's insight, i.e. input percept is a field. Therefore, APM helps us converge towards an implementation which can do both interpolation and perception on a shared-connectionist hardware. Our code is publicly available at https://rajatmodi62.github.io/apm_project_page/ -------- **It now appears that some of the ideas in GLOM could be made to work.** https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/16/1021871/geoffrey-hinton-glom-godfather-ai-neural-networks/ GLOM = Geoff's Latest Original Model. ``` .-""""""-. .' '. / O O \ | O | \ '------' / '. .' '-....-' Silent men in deep-contemplation. Silent men emerges only sometimes. Silent men love all. Silent men practice slow science. ```

This paper explores the impact of occlusions in video action detection. We facilitatethis study by introducing five new benchmark datasets namely O-UCF and O-JHMDB consisting of synthetically controlled static/dynamic occlusions, OVIS-UCF and OVIS-JHMDB consisting of occlusions with realistic motions and Real-OUCF for occlusions in realistic-world scenarios. We formally confirm an intuitiveexpectation: existing models suffer a lot as occlusion severity is increased andexhibit different behaviours when occluders are static vs when they are moving.We discover several intriguing phenomenon emerging in neural nets: 1) transformerscan naturally outperform CNN models which might have even used occlusion as aform of data augmentation during training 2) incorporating symbolic-componentslike capsules to such backbones allows them to bind to occluders never even seenduring training and 3) Islands of agreement (similar to the ones hypothesized inHinton et Al’s GLOM) can emerge in realistic images/videos without instance-levelsupervision, distillation or contrastive-based objectives(eg. video-textual training).Such emergent properties allow us to derive simple yet effective training recipeswhich lead to robust occlusion models inductively satisfying the first two stages ofthe binding mechanism (grouping/segregation). Models leveraging these recipesoutperform existing video action-detectors under occlusion by 32.3% on O-UCF,32.7% on O-JHMDB & 2.6% on Real-OUCF in terms of the vMAP metric. The code for this work has been released at https: //github.com/rajatmodi62/OccludedActionBenchmark.