  Although modern object detection and classification models achieve high
accuracy, these are typically constrained in advance on a fixed train set and
are therefore not flexible to deal with novel, unseen object categories.
Moreover, these models most often operate on a single frame, which may yield
incorrect classifications in case of ambiguous viewpoints. In this paper, we
propose an active inference agent that actively gathers evidence for object
classifications, and can learn novel object categories over time. Drawing
inspiration from the human brain, we build object-centric generative models
composed of two information streams, a what- and a where-stream. The
what-stream predicts whether the observed object belongs to a specific
category, while the where-stream is responsible for representing the object in
its internal 3D reference frame. We show that our agent (i) is able to learn
representations for many object categories in an unsupervised way, (ii)
achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracies, actively resolving
ambiguity when required and (iii) identifies novel object categories.
Furthermore, we validate our system in an end-to-end fashion where the agent is
able to search for an object at a given pose from a pixel-based rendering. We
believe that this is a first step towards building modular, intelligent systems
that can be used for a wide range of tasks involving three dimensional objects.
