Heterogeneous Learning for Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task aims to construct a graph structure to express objects and their relationships in a scene at a holistic level. Due to the neglect of heterogeneity of feature spaces between objects and relations, coupling of feature representations becomes obvious in current SGG methods, which results in large intra-class variation and inter-class ambiguity. In order to explicitly emphasize the heterogeneity in SGG, we propose a plug-and-play Heterogeneous Learning Branch (HLB), which enhances the independent representation capability of relation features. The HLB actively obscures the interconnection between objects and relation feature spaces via gradient reversal, with the assistance of a link prediction module as information barrier and an Auto Encoder for information preservation. To validate the effectiveness of HLB, we apply HLB to typical SGG methods in which the feature spaces are either homogeneous or semi-heterogeneous, and conduct evaluation on VG-150 dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that HLB significantly improves the performance of all these methods in the common evaluation criteria for SGG task.