# Pair then Relation: Pair-Net for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (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)
- [MOTR: End-to-End Multiple-Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03247/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [The All-Seeing Project V2: Towards General Relation Comprehension of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19474/) (2024)
- [Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17058/) (2023)
- [AID: Attention Interpolation of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17924/) (2024)
- [4D Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10305/) (2024)
- [OpenPSG: Open-set Panoptic Scene Graph Generation via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11213/) (2024)
- [VLPrompt: Vision-Language Prompting for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16492/) (2023)
- [Universal Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15005/) (2025)
- [Learning 4D Panoptic Scene Graph Generation from Rich 2D Visual Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15019/) (2025)
- [A Fair Ranking and New Model for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09216/) (2024)
- [CAT-SG: A Large Dynamic Scene Graph Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Cataract Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21813/) (2025)
- [A Review and Efficient Implementation of Scene Graph Generation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09616/) (2024)
- [Hi-Dyna Graph: Hierarchical Dynamic Scene Graph for Robotic Autonomy in Human-Centric Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00083/) (2025)
- [UNO: Unifying One-stage Video Scene Graph Generation via Object-Centric Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06165/) (2025)
- [Salience-SGG: Enhancing Unbiased Scene Graph Generation with Iterative Salience Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08728/) (2026)
- [THYME: Temporal Hierarchical-Cyclic Interactivity Modeling for Video Scene Graphs in Aerial Footage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09200/) (2025)
- [Can We Build Scene Graphs, Not Classify Them? FlowSG: Progressive Image-Conditioned Scene Graph Generation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18623/) (2026)
- [CAGE-SGG: Counterfactual Active Graph Evidence for Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22274/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) is a challenging task in Scene Graph Generation (SGG) that aims to create a more comprehensive scene graph representation using panoptic segmentation instead of boxes. Compared to SGG, PSG has several challenging problems: pixel-level segment outputs and full relationship exploration (It also considers thing and stuff relation). Thus, current PSG methods have limited performance, which hinders downstream tasks or applications. The goal of this work aims to design a novel and strong baseline for PSG. To achieve that, we first conduct an in-depth analysis to identify the bottleneck of the current PSG models, finding that inter-object pair-wise recall is a crucial factor that was ignored by previous PSG methods. Based on this and the recent query-based frameworks, we present a novel framework: Pair then Relation (Pair-Net), which uses a Pair Proposal Network (PPN) to learn and filter sparse pair-wise relationships between subjects and objects. Moreover, we also observed the sparse nature of object pairs for both Motivated by this, we design a lightweight Matrix Learner within the PPN, which directly learns pair-wised relationships for pair proposal generation. Through extensive ablation and analysis, our approach significantly improves upon leveraging the segmenter solid baseline. Notably, our method achieves over 10% absolute gains compared to our baseline, PSGFormer. The code of this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/king159/Pair-Net.