Author name cluster

Sindy Löwe

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7 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons

Takeru Miyato
Sindy Löwe
Andreas Geiger 0001
Max Welling

It has long been known in both neuroscience and AI that ``binding'' between neurons leads to a form of competitive learning where representations are compressed in order to represent more abstract concepts in deeper layers of the network. More recently, it was also hypothesized that dynamic (spatiotemporal) representations play an important role in both neuroscience and AI. Building on these ideas, we introduce Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) as a dynamical alternative to threshold units, which can be combined with arbitrary connectivity designs such as fully connected, convolutional, or attentive mechanisms. Our generalized Kuramoto updates bind neurons together through their synchronization dynamics. We show that this idea provides performance improvements across a wide spectrum of tasks such as unsupervised object discovery, adversarial robustness, calibrated uncertainty quantification, and reasoning. We believe that these empirical results show the importance of rethinking our assumptions at the most basic neuronal level of neural representation, and in particular show the importance of dynamical representations. Code: https://github.com/autonomousvision/akorn Project page: https://takerum.github.io/akorn_project_page/

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UAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

BISCUIT: Causal Representation Learning from Binary Interactions

Phillip Lippe
Sara Magliacane
Sindy Löwe
Yuki M. Asano
Taco Cohen
Efstratios Gavves

Identifying the causal variables of an environment and how to intervene on them is of core value in applications such as robotics and embodied AI. While an agent can commonly interact with the environment and may implicitly perturb the behavior of some of these causal variables, often the targets it affects remain unknown. In this paper, we show that causal variables can still be identified for many common setups, e. g. , additive Gaussian noise models, if the agent’s interactions with a causal variable can be described by an unknown binary variable. This happens when each causal variable has two different mechanisms, e. g. , an observational and an interventional one. Using this identifiability result, we propose BISCUIT, a method for simultaneously learning causal variables and their corresponding binary interaction variables. On three robotic-inspired datasets, BISCUIT accurately identifies causal variables and can even be scaled to complex, realistic environments for embodied AI.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Causal Representation Learning for Instantaneous and Temporal Effects in Interactive Systems

Phillip Lippe
Sara Magliacane
Sindy Löwe
Yuki M. Asano
Taco Cohen
Efstratios Gavves

Causal representation learning is the task of identifying the underlying causal variables and their relations from high-dimensional observations, such as images. Recent work has shown that one can reconstruct the causal variables from temporal sequences of observations under the assumption that there are no instantaneous causal relations between them. In practical applications, however, our measurement or frame rate might be slower than many of the causal effects. This effectively creates ``instantaneous'' effects and invalidates previous identifiability results. To address this issue, we propose iCITRIS, a causal representation learning method that allows for instantaneous effects in intervened temporal sequences when intervention targets can be observed, e.g., as actions of an agent. iCITRIS identifies the potentially multidimensional causal variables from temporal observations, while simultaneously using a differentiable causal discovery method to learn their causal graph. In experiments on three datasets of interactive systems, iCITRIS accurately identifies the causal variables and their causal graph.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Rotating Features for Object Discovery

Sindy Löwe
Phillip Lippe
Francesco Locatello
Max Welling

The binding problem in human cognition, concerning how the brain represents and connects objects within a fixed network of neural connections, remains a subject of intense debate. Most machine learning efforts addressing this issue in an unsupervised setting have focused on slot-based methods, which may be limiting due to their discrete nature and difficulty to express uncertainty. Recently, the Complex AutoEncoder was proposed as an alternative that learns continuous and distributed object-centric representations. However, it is only applicable to simple toy data. In this paper, we present Rotating Features, a generalization of complex-valued features to higher dimensions, and a new evaluation procedure for extracting objects from distributed representations. Additionally, we show the applicability of our approach to pre-trained features. Together, these advancements enable us to scale distributed object-centric representations from simple toy to real-world data. We believe this work advances a new paradigm for addressing the binding problem in machine learning and has the potential to inspire further innovation in the field.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

CITRIS: Causal Identifiability from Temporal Intervened Sequences

Phillip Lippe
Sara Magliacane
Sindy Löwe
Yuki M. Asano
Taco Cohen
Stratis Gavves

Understanding the latent causal factors of a dynamical system from visual observations is considered a crucial step towards agents reasoning in complex environments. In this paper, we propose CITRIS, a variational autoencoder framework that learns causal representations from temporal sequences of images in which underlying causal factors have possibly been intervened upon. In contrast to the recent literature, CITRIS exploits temporality and observing intervention targets to identify scalar and multidimensional causal factors, such as 3D rotation angles. Furthermore, by introducing a normalizing flow, CITRIS can be easily extended to leverage and disentangle representations obtained by already pretrained autoencoders. Extending previous results on scalar causal factors, we prove identifiability in a more general setting, in which only some components of a causal factor are affected by interventions. In experiments on 3D rendered image sequences, CITRIS outperforms previous methods on recovering the underlying causal variables. Moreover, using pretrained autoencoders, CITRIS can even generalize to unseen instantiations of causal factors, opening future research areas in sim-to-real generalization for causal representation learning.

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TMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

Complex-Valued Autoencoders for Object Discovery

Sindy Löwe
Phillip Lippe
Maja Rudolph
Max Welling

Object-centric representations form the basis of human perception, and enable us to reason about the world and to systematically generalize to new settings. Currently, most works on unsupervised object discovery focus on slot-based approaches, which explicitly separate the latent representations of individual objects. While the result is easily interpretable, it usually requires the design of involved architectures. In contrast to this, we propose a comparatively simple approach – the Complex AutoEncoder (CAE) – that creates distributed object-centric representations. Following a coding scheme theorized to underlie object representations in biological neurons, its complex-valued activations represent two messages: their magnitudes express the presence of a feature, while the relative phase differences between neurons express which features should be bound together to create joint object representations. In contrast to previous approaches using complex-valued activations for object discovery, we present a fully unsupervised approach that is trained end-to-end – resulting in significant improvements in performance and efficiency. Further, we show that the CAE achieves competitive or better unsupervised object discovery performance on simple multi-object datasets compared to a state-of-the-art slot-based approach while being up to 100 times faster to train.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Putting An End to End-to-End: Gradient-Isolated Learning of Representations

Sindy Löwe
Peter O'Connor
Bastiaan Veeling

We propose a novel deep learning method for local self-supervised representation learning that does not require labels nor end-to-end backpropagation but exploits the natural order in data instead. Inspired by the observation that biological neural networks appear to learn without backpropagating a global error signal, we split a deep neural network into a stack of gradient-isolated modules. Each module is trained to maximally preserve the information of its inputs using the InfoNCE bound from Oord et al [2018]. Despite this greedy training, we demonstrate that each module improves upon the output of its predecessor, and that the representations created by the top module yield highly competitive results on downstream classification tasks in the audio and visual domain. The proposal enables optimizing modules asynchronously, allowing large-scale distributed training of very deep neural networks on unlabelled datasets.

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