Humans are able to make rich predictions about the future dynamics of physical objects from a glance. On the other hand, most existing computer vision approaches require strong assumptions about the underlying system, ad-hoc modeling, or annotated datasets, to carry out even simple predictions. To tackle this gap, we propose a new perspective on the problem of learning intuitive physics that is inspired by the spatial memory representation of objects and spaces in human brains, in particular the co-existence of egocentric and allocentric spatial representations. We present a generic framework that learns a layered representation of the physical world, using a cascade of invertible modules. In this framework, real images are first converted to a synthetic domain representation that reduces complexity arising from lighting and texture. Then, an allocentric viewpoint transformer removes viewpoint complexity by projecting images to a canonical view. Finally, a novel Recurrent Latent Variation Network (RLVN) architecture learns the dynamics of the objects interacting with the environment and predicts future motion, leveraging the availability of unlimited synthetic simulations. Predicted frames are then projected back to the original camera view and translated back to the real world domain. Experimental results show the ability of the framework to consistently and accurately predict several frames in the future and the ability to adapt to real images.
From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains or require information about the underlying state. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments. Reasoning about objects, relations, and physics is central to human intelligence, and a key goal of artificial intelligence. Here we introduce the interaction network, a model which can reason about how objects in complex systems interact, supporting dynamical predictions, as well as inferences about the abstract properties of the system. Our model takes graphs as input, performs object- and relation-centric reasoning in a way that is analogous to a simulation, and is implemented using deep neural networks. We evaluate its ability to reason about several challenging physical domains: n-body problems, rigid-body collision, and non-rigid dynamics. Our results show it can be trained to accurately simulate the physical trajectories of dozens of objects over thousands of time steps, estimate abstract quantities such as energy, and generalize automatically to systems with different numbers and configurations of objects and relations. Our interaction network implementation is the first general-purpose, learnable physics engine, and a powerful general framework for reasoning about object and relations in a wide variety of complex real-world domains. 