Enhancing Scene Graph Generation with Hierarchical Relationships and Commonsense Knowledge

Bowen Jiang, Zhijun Zhuang, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Camillo J. Taylor; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 8865-8876

This work introduces an enhanced approach to generating scene graphs by incorporating both a relationship hierarchy and commonsense knowledge. Specifically we begin by proposing a hierarchical relation head that exploits an informative hierarchical structure. It jointly predicts the relation super-category between object pairs in an image along with detailed relations under each super-category. Following this we implement a robust commonsense validation pipeline that harnesses foundation models to critique the results from the scene graph prediction system removing nonsensical predicates even with a small language-only model. Extensive experiments on Visual Genome and OpenImage V6 datasets demonstrate that the proposed modules can be seamlessly integrated as plug-and-play enhancements to existing scene graph generation algorithms. The results show significant improvements with an extensive set of reasonable predictions beyond dataset annotations. Codes are available at https://github.com/bowenupenn/scene graph_commonsense.