Conversational Group Detection with Graph Neural Networks

We study conversational group detection in varied social scenes using a message-passing Graph Neural Network (GNN) in combination with the Dominant Sets clustering algorithm. Our approach first describes a scene as an interaction graph, where nodes encode individual features and edges encode pairwise relationship data. Then, it uses a GNN to predict pairwise affinity values that represent the likelihood of two people interacting together, and computes non-overlapping group assignments based on these affinities. We evaluate the proposed approach on the Cocktail Party and MatchNMingle datasets. Our results suggest that using GNNs to leverage both individual and relationship features when computing groups is beneficial, especially when more features are available for each individual.