  Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding
of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric
representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video
datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric
or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less
information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view
images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for
single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of
object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework
for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists
of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules,
Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder
(IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background
noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of
object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach
for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant
annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method
enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves
strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at
\url{https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH}.
