Bridging Knowledge Graphs to Generate Scene Graphs

Scene graphs are powerful representations that encode images into their abstract semantic elements, i.e, objects and their interactions, which facilitates visual comprehension and explainable reasoning. On the other hand, commonsense knowledge graphs are rich repositories that encode how the world is structured, and how general concepts interact. In this paper, we present a unified formulation of these two constructs, where a scene graph is seen as an image-conditioned instantiation of a commonsense knowledge graph. Based on this new perspective, we re-formulate scene graph generation as the inference of a bridge between the scene and commonsense graphs, where each entity or predicate instance in the scene graph has to be linked to its corresponding entity or predicate class in the commonsense graph. To this end, we propose a heterogeneous graph inference framework allowing to exploit the rich structure within the scene and commonsense at the same time. Through extensive experiments, we show the proposed method achieves significant improvement over the state of the art.