Towards Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Prompt-Based Finetuning

Tao He, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Yuan-Fang Li ;

"Scene graph generation (SGG) is a fundamental task aimed at detecting visual relations between objects in an image. The prevailing SGG methods require all object classes to be given in the training set. Such a closed setting limits the practical application of SGG. In this paper, we introduce open-vocabulary scene graph generation, a novel, realistic and challenging setting, in which a model is trained on a small set of base object classes but is required to infer relations for unseen target object classes. To this end, we propose a two-step method which firstly pre-trains on large amounts of coarse-grained region-caption data and then leverage two prompt-based techniques to finetune the pre-trained model without updating its parameters. Moreover, our method is able to support inference over completely unseen object classes, which existing methods are incapable of handling. On extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, Visual Genome, GQA and Open-Image, our method significantly outperforms recent, strong SGG methods on the setting of Ov-SGG, as well as on the conventional closed SGG."