Visual Relationships As Functions: Enabling Few-Shot Scene Graph Prediction

Scene graph prediction - classifying of objects and predicates in a visual scene - requires substantial training data. The long-tailed distribution of relationships can he an obstacle for such approaches, however; as they can only be trained on the small set of predicates that carry sufficient labels. We introduce the first scene graph prediction model that supports few-shot learning of predicates, enabling scene graph approaches to generalize to a set of new predicates. First, we introduce a new model of predicates as that operate on object features or image locations. Next, we define a scene graph model where these functions are trained as message passing protocols within a new graph convolution framework. We train the framework with a frequently occurring set of predicates and show that our approach outperforms those that use the same amount of supervision by 1.78 at recall@50 and performs on par with other scene graph models. Next, we extract object representations generated by the trained predicate functions to train few-shot predicate classifiers on rare predicates with as fern as 1 labeled example. When compared to strong baselines like transfer learning from existing state-of-the-art representations, we show improved 5-shot performance by 4.16 recall@1. Finally, we show that our predicate functions generate interpretable visual, enabling, the first interpretable scene graph model.