To reach human performance on complex tasks, a key ability for artificial
systems is to understand physical interactions between objects, and predict
future outcomes of a situation. This ability, often referred to as intuitive
physics, has recently received attention and several methods were proposed to
learn these physical rules from video sequences. Yet, most of these methods are
restricted to the case where no, or only limited, occlusions occur. In this
work we propose a probabilistic formulation of learning intuitive physics in 3D
scenes with significant inter-object occlusions. In our formulation, object
positions are modeled as latent variables enabling the reconstruction of the
scene. We then propose a series of approximations that make this problem
tractable. Object proposals are linked across frames using a combination of a
recurrent interaction network, modeling the physics in object space, and a
compositional renderer, modeling the way in which objects project onto pixel
space. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art in the
intuitive physics benchmark of IntPhys. We apply our method to a second dataset
with increasing levels of occlusions, showing it realistically predicts
segmentation masks up to 30 frames in the future. Finally, we also show results
on predicting motion of objects in real videos