  Automatically discovering composable abstractions from raw perceptual data is
a long-standing challenge in machine learning. Recent slot-based neural
networks that learn about objects in a self-supervised manner have made
exciting progress in this direction. However, they typically fall short at
adequately capturing spatial symmetries present in the visual world, which
leads to sample inefficiency, such as when entangling object appearance and
pose. In this paper, we present a simple yet highly effective method for
incorporating spatial symmetries via slot-centric reference frames. We
incorporate equivariance to per-object pose transformations into the attention
and generation mechanism of Slot Attention by translating, scaling, and
rotating position encodings. These changes result in little computational
overhead, are easy to implement, and can result in large gains in terms of data
efficiency and overall improvements to object discovery. We evaluate our method
on a wide range of synthetic object discovery benchmarks namely CLEVR,
Tetrominoes, CLEVRTex, Objects Room and MultiShapeNet, and show promising
improvements on the challenging real-world Waymo Open dataset.
