# SPAN: Learning Similarity between Scene Graphs and Images with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00590 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00590/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [Image Generation from Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01622/) (2018)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose Dynamic Tree Structures for Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01880/) (2018)
- [Auto-Encoding Scene Graphs for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02378/) (2018)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [GPS-Net: Graph Property Sensing Network for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12962/) (2020)
- [Bipartite Graph Network with Adaptive Message Passing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00308/) (2021)
- [Energy-Based Learning for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02221/) (2021)
- [Explainable and Explicit Visual Reasoning over Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01855/) (2018)
- [SGTR: End-to-end Scene Graph Generation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12970/) (2021)
- [Scene Graph Generation with External Knowledge and Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00560/) (2019)
- [Graphical Contrastive Losses for Scene Graph Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02728/) (2019)
- [RelTR: Relation Transformer for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11460/) (2022)
- [Specifying Object Attributes and Relations in Interactive Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05379/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RLIPv2: Fast Scaling of Relational Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09351/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Structured Representations into Pretrained Vision & Language Models Using Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06343/) (2023)
- [WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12461/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning similarity between scene graphs and images aims to estimate a similarity score given a scene graph and an image. There is currently no research dedicated to this task, although it is critical for scene graph generation and downstream applications. Scene graph generation is conventionally evaluated by Recall@K and mean Recall@K, which measure the ratio of predicted triplets that appear in the human-labeled triplet set. However, such triplet-oriented metrics fail to demonstrate the overall semantic difference between a scene graph and an image and are sensitive to annotation bias and noise. Using generated scene graphs in the downstream applications is therefore limited. To address this issue, for the first time, we propose a Scene graPh-imAge coNtrastive learning framework, SPAN, that can measure the similarity between scene graphs and images. Our novel framework consists of a graph Transformer and an image Transformer to align scene graphs and their corresponding images in the shared latent space. We introduce a novel graph serialization technique that transforms a scene graph into a sequence with structural encodings. Based on our framework, we propose R-Precision measuring image retrieval accuracy as a new evaluation metric for scene graph generation. We establish new benchmarks on the Visual Genome and Open Images datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of SPAN, which shows great potential as a scene graph encoder.