Obtaining the human-like perception ability of abstracting visual concepts from concrete pixels has always been a fundamental and important target in machine learning research fields such as disentangled representation learning and scene decomposition. Towards this goal, we propose an unsupervised transformer-based Visual Concepts Tokenization framework, dubbed VCT, to perceive an image into a set of disentangled visual concept tokens, with each concept token responding to one type of independent visual concept. Particularly, to obtain these concept tokens, we only use cross-attention to extract visual information from the image tokens layer by layer without self-attention between concept tokens, preventing information leakage across concept tokens. We further propose a Concept Disentangling Loss to facilitate that different concept tokens represent independent visual concepts. The cross-attention and disentangling loss play the role of induction and mutual exclusion for the concept tokens, respectively. Extensive experiments on several popular datasets verify the effectiveness of VCT on the tasks of disentangled representation learning and scene decomposition. VCT achieves the state of the art results by a large margin.

InfoGAN-CR [23]), along with others [37, 28], have been proposed to advance this field further. This work was done during internship at Microsoft Research Asia.

InfoGAN-CR [23]), along with others [37, 28], have been proposed to advance this field further. This work was done during internship at Microsoft Research Asia.

This paper reviews the 1st International Workshop on Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Generation (DRL4Real), held in conjunction with ICCV 2025. The workshop aimed to bridge the gap between the theoretical promise of Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) and its application in realistic scenarios, moving beyond synthetic benchmarks. DRL4Real focused on evaluating DRL methods in practical applications such as controllable generation, exploring advancements in model robustness, interpretability, and generalization. The workshop accepted 9 papers covering a broad range of topics, including the integration of novel inductive biases (e.g., language), the application of diffusion models to DRL, 3D-aware disentanglement, and the expansion of DRL into specialized domains like autonomous driving and EEG analysis. This summary details the workshop's objectives, the themes of the accepted papers, and provides an overview of the methodologies proposed by the authors.

As deep spatio-temporal neural networks are increasingly utilised in urban computing contexts, the deployment of such methods can have a direct impact on users of critical urban infrastructure, such as public transport, emergency services, and traffic management systems. While many spatio-temporal methods focus on improving accuracy, fairness has recently gained attention due to growing evidence that biased predictions in spatio-temporal applications can disproportionately disadvantage certain demographic or geographic groups, thereby reinforcing existing socioeconomic inequalities and undermining the ethical deployment of AI in public services. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, FairDRL-ST, based on disentangled representation learning, to address fairness concerns in spatio-temporal prediction, with a particular focus on mobility demand forecasting. By leveraging adversarial learning and disentangled representation learning, our framework learns to separate attributes that contain sensitive information. Unlike existing methods that enforce fairness through supervised learning, which may lead to overcompensation and degraded performance, our framework achieves fairness in an unsupervised manner with minimal performance loss. We apply our framework to real-world urban mobility datasets and demonstrate its ability to close fairness gaps while delivering competitive predictive performance compared to state-of-the-art fairness-aware methods.

Considering various data modalities, such as images, videos, and text, humans perform causal reasoning using high-level causal variables, as opposed to operating at the low, pixel level from which the data comes. In practice, most causal reasoning methods assume that the data is described as granular as the underlying causal generative factors, which is often violated in various AI tasks. This mismatch translates into a lack of guarantees in various tasks such as generative modeling, decision-making, fairness, and generalizability, to cite a few. In this paper, we acknowledge this issue and study the problem of causal disentangled representation learning from a combination of data gathered from various heterogeneous domains and assumptions in the form of a latent causal graph. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed work is the first to consider i) non-Markovian causal settings, where there may be unobserved confounding, ii) arbitrary distributions that arise from multiple domains, and iii) a relaxed version of disentanglement.

Learners sharing similar implicit cognitive states often display comparable observable problem-solving performances. Leveraging collaborative connections among such similar learners proves valuable in comprehending human learning. Motivated by the success of collaborative modeling in various domains, such as recommender systems, we aim to investigate how collaborative signals among learners contribute to the diagnosis of human cognitive states (i.e., knowledge proficiency) in the context of intelligent education.The primary challenges lie in identifying implicit collaborative connections and disentangling the entangled cognitive factors of learners for improved explainability and controllability in learner Cognitive Diagnosis (CD). However, there has been no work on CD capable of simultaneously modeling collaborative and disentangled cognitive states. To address this gap, we present Coral, a \underline{Co} llabo \underline{ra} tive cognitive diagnosis model with disentang \underline{l} ed representation learning.

Obtaining the human-like perception ability of abstracting visual concepts from concrete pixels has always been a fundamental and important target in machine learning research fields such as disentangled representation learning and scene decomposition. Towards this goal, we propose an unsupervised transformer-based Visual Concepts Tokenization framework, dubbed VCT, to perceive an image into a set of disentangled visual concept tokens, with each concept token responding to one type of independent visual concept. Particularly, to obtain these concept tokens, we only use cross-attention to extract visual information from the image tokens layer by layer without self-attention between concept tokens, preventing information leakage across concept tokens. We further propose a Concept Disentangling Loss to facilitate that different concept tokens represent independent visual concepts. The cross-attention and disentangling loss play the role of induction and mutual exclusion for the concept tokens, respectively.