# Learning to Compose Dynamic Tree Structures for Visual Contexts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 259 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 259)

- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)
- [GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03601/) (2023)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [Bipartite Graph Network with Adaptive Message Passing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00308/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scene Graphs: Generation and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01111/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11247/) (2022)
- [Energy-Based Learning for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02221/) (2021)
- [SkySenseGPT: A Fine-Grained Instruction Tuning Dataset and Model for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10100/) (2024)
- [SGTR: End-to-end Scene Graph Generation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12970/) (2021)
- [Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Dynamic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12309/) (2021)
- [RelTR: Relation Transformer for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11460/) (2022)
- [The All-Seeing Project V2: Towards General Relation Comprehension of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19474/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Construction and Application: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05786/) (2022)
- [Scene Graph Generation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00443/) (2022)
- [Recovering the Unbiased Scene Graphs from the Biased Ones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02112/) (2021)
- [Stacked Hybrid-Attention and Group Collaborative Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09811/) (2022)
- [Learning of Visual Relations: The Devil is in the Tails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09668/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generate Scene Graph from Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02227/) (2021)
- [The Devil is in the Labels: Noisy Label Correction for Robust Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03014/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16083/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Scene Graph Generation with Data Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11654/) (2022)
- [Towards Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Prompt-based Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08165/) (2022)
- [Target Adaptive Context Aggregation for Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08121/) (2021)
- [Deep Dual Consecutive Network for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07254/) (2021)
- [From General to Specific: Informative Scene Graph Generation via Balance Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13129/) (2021)
- [Action Scene Graphs for Long-Form Understanding of Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03391/) (2023)
- [EGTR: Extracting Graph from Transformer for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02072/) (2024)
- [Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17058/) (2023)
- [RLIPv2: Fast Scaling of Relational Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09351/) (2023)
- [Structured Sparse R-CNN for Direct Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10815/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose to compose dynamic tree structures that place the objects in an image into a visual context, helping visual reasoning tasks such as scene graph generation and visual Q&A. Our visual context tree model, dubbed VCTree, has two key advantages over existing structured object representations including chains and fully-connected graphs: 1) The efficient and expressive binary tree encodes the inherent parallel/hierarchical relationships among objects, e.g., "clothes" and "pants" are usually co-occur and belong to "person"; 2) the dynamic structure varies from image to image and task to task, allowing more content-/task-specific message passing among objects. To construct a VCTree, we design a score function that calculates the task-dependent validity between each object pair, and the tree is the binary version of the maximum spanning tree from the score matrix. Then, visual contexts are encoded by bidirectional TreeLSTM and decoded by task-specific models. We develop a hybrid learning procedure which integrates end-task supervised learning and the tree structure reinforcement learning, where the former's evaluation result serves as a self-critic for the latter's structure exploration. Experimental results on two benchmarks, which require reasoning over contexts: Visual Genome for scene graph generation and VQA2.0 for visual Q&A, show that VCTree outperforms state-of-the-art results while discovering interpretable visual context structures.