SCoRD: Subject-Conditional Relation Detection With Text-Augmented Data

Ziyan Yang, Kushal Kafle, Zhe Lin, Scott Cohen, Zhihong Ding, Vicente Ordonez; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 5731-5741

We propose Subject-Conditional Relation Detection SCoRD, where conditioned on an input subject, the goal is to predict all its relations to other objects in a scene along with their locations. Based on the Open Images dataset, we propose a challenging OIv6-SCoRD benchmark such that the training and testing splits have a distribution shift in terms of the occurrence statistics of <subject, relation, object> triplets. To solve this problem, we propose an auto-regressive model that given a subject, it predicts its relations, objects, and object locations by casting this output as a sequence of tokens. First, we show that previous scene-graph prediction methods fail to produce as exhaustive an enumeration of relation-object pairs when conditioned on a subject on this benchmark. Particularly, we obtain a recall@3 of 83.8% for our relation-object predictions compared to the 49.75% obtained by a recent scene graph detector. Then, we show improved generalization on both relation-object and object-box predictions by leveraging during training relation-object pairs obtained automatically from textual captions and for which no object-box annotations are available. Particularly, for <subject, relation, object> triplets for which no object locations are available during training, we are able to obtain a recall@3 of 33.80% for relation-object pairs and 26.75% for their box locations.