VrR-VG: Refocusing Visually-Relevant Relationships

Yuanzhi Liang, Yalong Bai, Wei Zhang, Xueming Qian, Li Zhu, Tao Mei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 10403-10412

Relationships encode the interactions among individual instances and play a critical role in deep visual scene understanding. Suffering from the high predictability with non-visual information, relationship models tend to fit the statistical bias rather than "learning" to infer the relationships from images. To encourage further development in visual relationships, we propose a novel method to mine more valuable relationships by automatically pruning visually-irrelevant relationships. We construct a new scene graph dataset named Visually-Relevant Relationships Dataset (VrR-VG) based on Visual Genome. Compared with existing datasets, the performance gap between learnable and statistical method is more significant in VrR-VG, and frequency-based analysis does not work anymore. Moreover, we propose to learn a relationship-aware representation by jointly considering instances, attributes and relationships. By applying the representation-aware feature learned on VrR-VG, the performances of image captioning and visual question answering are systematically improved, which demonstrates the effectiveness of both our dataset and features embedding schema. Both our VrR-VG dataset and representation-aware features will be made publicly available soon.