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arxiv: 2605.14937 · v1 · pith:CMISRVN2new · submitted 2026-05-14 · 💻 cs.LG · cs.AI· cs.RO

Slot-MPC: Goal-Conditioned Model Predictive Control with Object-Centric Representations

Pith reviewed 2026-06-30 20:57 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.LG cs.AIcs.RO
keywords object-centric representationsmodel predictive controlworld modelsrobotic manipulationslot attentiongoal-conditioned planningreinforcement learningdynamics modeling
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The pith

Object-centric slot representations enable gradient-based model predictive control for adapting to novel robotic manipulation tasks.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces Slot-MPC to combine object-centric world models with model predictive control. It learns slot-based encodings of individual objects from vision and trains an action-conditioned dynamics model on those encodings. At test time the model supports planning by optimizing sequences of actions through gradient descent rather than sampling. This setup is tested on simulated robotic tasks where it outperforms non-object-centric baselines in both success rate and planning speed, particularly when training data covers only limited state-action pairs. The central argument is that the explicit object structure supplies an inductive bias that makes the learned model controllable and able to generalize beyond the training distribution.

Core claim

Slot-MPC extracts slot-based object representations with vision encoders, trains an action-conditioned dynamics model on those slots, and performs goal-conditioned planning at inference time by using the differentiable dynamics inside a gradient-based model predictive controller. In offline robotic manipulation settings the method yields higher task success and lower planning cost than non-object-centric world-model baselines, with gradient-based optimization outperforming sampling-based optimization under limited data coverage.

What carries the argument

Slot-based representations that isolate individual objects, paired with an action-conditioned object-centric dynamics model that is differentiated through gradient-based MPC to optimize action sequences.

If this is right

  • Agents can generate new action sequences at test time instead of executing a fixed reactive policy.
  • Gradient-based optimization of actions is computationally cheaper than sampling-based MPC when the dynamics model is differentiable.
  • Performance remains higher than non-object-centric baselines even when state-action coverage in the training data is limited.
  • The same learned world model supports planning toward goals that were not encountered during training.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same slot-plus-MPC structure could be tested on tasks where objects must be composed in ways never seen together during training.
  • Because the planner is differentiable, one could explore adding a planning loss directly into the representation learning stage.
  • If slot extraction remains reliable under real camera noise, the approach might transfer to physical robots without additional online fine-tuning.

Load-bearing premise

Vision encoders must produce slot representations that correctly separate objects from one another and that support accurate prediction of how those objects move under actions.

What would settle it

Measure planning success on held-out manipulation tasks after deliberately training the vision encoder on data that mixes object identities or occlusions; if success drops to baseline levels the claim fails.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.14937 by Angel Villar-Corrales, Jonathan Spieler, Sven Behnke.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview of Slot-MPC. (a) The object-centric world model (cOCVP) is trained given a single video frame X1 and actions a, and autoregressively predicts future video frames and slot representations S. (b) Slot-MPC parses an image X1 into its object representations S1 and then predicts the future object states over the horizon H using cOCVP given actions a, which are provided by MPC. The goal image XG is also… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Environments. We evaluate Slot-MPC on four different environments. 14 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: DINO-WM evaluation on subtrajectories. (a) With a goal horizon of H=25. (b) With a goal horizon of H=50. The bottom row corresponds to the predicted frames and the top row (shaded for visual distinction) are the actual observations from the simulator. The last image is the goal image. We visualize the predictions and decomposition results of the object-centric models of Slot-MPC for the considered environm… view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Predictions and decomposition results for Button Press. Slot-MPC assigns a slot for the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Predictions and decomposition results for Lever Pull. Slot-MPC assigns a slot for the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Predictions and decomposition results for Stack. Slot-MPC assigns a slot for the background, [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Predictions and decomposition results for Square. Slot-MPC assigns a slot for the back [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_7.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Predictive world models enable agents to model scene dynamics and reason about the consequences of their actions. Inspired by human perception, object-centric world models capture scene dynamics using object-level representations, which can be used for downstream applications such as action planning. However, most object-centric world models and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn reactive policies that are fixed at inference time, limiting generalization to novel situations. We propose Slot-MPC, an object-centric world modeling framework that enables planning through Model Predictive Control (MPC). Slot-MPC leverages vision encoders to learn slot-based representations, which encode individual objects in the scene, and uses these structured representations to learn an action-conditioned object-centric dynamics model. At inference time, the learned dynamics model enables action planning via MPC, allowing agents to adapt to previously unseen situations. Since the learned world model is differentiable, we can use gradient-based MPC to directly optimize actions, which is computationally more efficient than relying on gradient-free, sampling-based MPC methods. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that Slot-MPC improves both task performance and planning efficiency compared to non-object-centric world model baselines. In the considered offline setting with limited state-action coverage, we find that gradient-based MPC performs better than gradient-free, sampling-based MPC. Our results demonstrate that explicitly structured, object-centric representations provide a strong inductive bias for controllable and generalizable decision-making. Code and additional results are available at https://slot-mpc.github.io.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 0 minor

Summary. The paper proposes Slot-MPC, an object-centric world modeling framework that learns slot-based representations via vision encoders, trains an action-conditioned object dynamics model, and performs goal-conditioned planning at inference time using differentiable gradient-based MPC. It claims that this yields improved task performance and planning efficiency over non-object-centric baselines on simulated robotic manipulation tasks, with particular advantages in an offline limited state-action coverage regime, attributing the gains to the inductive bias of explicitly structured representations.

Significance. If the empirical results hold with appropriate controls and ablations, the work would provide evidence that object-centric slot representations supply a useful inductive bias for generalization and controllability in model-based planning, especially under data scarcity. The public release of code and additional results at the project page is a clear strength that supports reproducibility.

major comments (1)
  1. Abstract: the central claim of performance gains over baselines (including better results for gradient-based vs. sampling-based MPC in the offline regime) is stated without any quantitative metrics, error bars, dataset sizes, task descriptions, or ablation results. This absence makes the strength of evidence for the inductive-bias conclusion impossible to evaluate from the provided text.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their review and the opportunity to clarify the presentation of our results. We address the single major comment below.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: Abstract: the central claim of performance gains over baselines (including better results for gradient-based vs. sampling-based MPC in the offline regime) is stated without any quantitative metrics, error bars, dataset sizes, task descriptions, or ablation results. This absence makes the strength of evidence for the inductive-bias conclusion impossible to evaluate from the provided text.

    Authors: We agree that the abstract would be strengthened by the inclusion of indicative quantitative results. Abstracts are subject to strict length limits, which led us to prioritize high-level claims, but we will revise the abstract in the next version to include brief performance highlights (e.g., relative success-rate improvements and planning-time reductions) drawn from the main experiments. The full supporting evidence—including error bars, exact dataset sizes (number of offline trajectories), task descriptions, and ablation studies—is already present in Section 4 (Experiments) and the supplementary material. These results directly underpin the inductive-bias claim, especially the offline-regime comparison between gradient-based and sampling-based MPC. revision: partial

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity

full rationale

The paper describes a standard pipeline of learning slot-based vision encoders and an action-conditioned object dynamics model from data, followed by gradient-based MPC planning at inference time. No equations, derivations, or claims are shown that reduce a 'prediction' or result to its own inputs by construction, self-definition, or load-bearing self-citation. The central claim rests on empirical comparisons to non-object-centric baselines in simulated tasks, which are independent of any internal definitional loop.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

Abstract provides no explicit free parameters, axioms, or invented entities; assessment is limited to surface claims.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Slot-based representations learned from vision encoders can isolate objects and capture their dynamics sufficiently for planning.
    Core premise invoked when stating that the representations enable downstream MPC.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5799 in / 1099 out tokens · 23910 ms · 2026-06-30T20:57:21.356021+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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    for the implementation of both the object-centric decomposition model and the structured dynamics model. Object-Centric Decomposition:The object-centric decomposition is based on SA Vi [Kipf et al., 2022], a recursive slot-based model that serves as our scene parsing and object rendering modules. Specifically, we adopt their proposed CNN-based image encod...

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    Through the attention mechanism, information from the object slots is aggregated into the [ACT]token, which is subsequently mapped to produce a single action ˆ ausing a learnable linear projection head. The policy is rolled out autoregressively over the horizonHusing the learned dynamics model to generate an initial action sequence for MPC. C.3 Training D...

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    πθ Training:We train the πθ module given pretrained and frozen SA Vi, and cOCVP modules. This module is trained with the Adam optimizer [Kingma and Ba, 2015], batch size of 64, and a learning rate of3×10 −4. C.4 Model Predictive Control We compare two different MPC methods: gradient-based MPC and MPPI. For both, we use a policy network to warm-start the o...

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    for a complete list of hyperparameters. DINO-WM:For DINO-WM, we use the official implementation provided by the authors and licensed under an MIT license: https://github.com/gaoyuezhou/dino_wm. We use the default hyperparameters suggested by the authors. OCVP:For our experiments, we use OCVP as the object-centric world model and base our implementation on...