Vision Relation Transformer for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Gopika Sudhakaran, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting, Stefan Roth; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 21882-21893

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Scene Graph Generation (SGG), a comprehensive visual scene understanding task that aims to predict entity relationships using a relation encoder-decoder pipeline stacked on top of an object encoder-decoder backbone. Unfortunately, current SGG methods suffer from an information loss regarding the entities' local-level cues during the relation encoding process. To mitigate this, we introduce the Vision rElation TransfOrmer (VETO), consisting of a novel local-level entity relation encoder. We further observe that many existing SGG methods claim to be unbiased, but are still biased towards either head or tail classes. To overcome this bias, we introduce a Mutually Exclusive ExperT (MEET) learning strategy that captures important relation features without bias towards head or tail classes. Experimental results on the VG and GQA datasets demonstrate that VETO + MEET boosts the predictive performance by up to 47% over the state of the art while being 10x smaller.