Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Using Predicate Similarities

Scene Graphs are widely applied in computer vision as a graphical representation of relationships between objects shown in images. However, these applications have not yet reached a practical stage of development owing to biased training caused by long-tailed predicate distributions. In recent years, many studies have tackled this problem. In contrast, relatively few works have considered predicate similarities as a unique dataset feature which also leads to the biased prediction. Due to the feature, infrequent predicates (e.g., “parked on”, “covered in”) are easily misclassified as closely-related frequent predicates (e.g., “on”, “in”). Utilizing predicate similarities, we propose a new classification scheme that branches the process to several fine-grained classifiers for similar predicate groups. The classifiers aim to capture the differences among similar predicates in detail. We also introduce the idea of transfer learning to enhance the features for the predicates which lack sufficient training samples to learn the descriptive representations. Our target here is to improve the average precision scores even for the instances with the tail predicators. The results of extensive experiments on the Visual Genome dataset show that the combination of our method and an existing debiasing approach greatly improves performance on tail predicates in challenging SGCls/SGDet tasks. Nonetheless, the overall performance of the proposed approach does not reach that of the current state of the art, so further analysis remains necessary as future work.