# Informative Scene Graph Generation via Debiasing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05286 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05286/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [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)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose Dynamic Tree Structures for Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01880/) (2018)
- [GPS-Net: Graph Property Sensing Network for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12962/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-Embedded Routing Network for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03326/) (2019)
- [Seesaw Loss for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10032/) (2020)
- [Bipartite Graph Network with Adaptive Message Passing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00308/) (2021)
- [Graph-Structured Representations for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05600/) (2016)
- [Visual Translation Embedding Network for Visual Relation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08319/) (2017)
- [Energy-Based Learning for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02221/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Bridging Knowledge Graphs to Generate Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02314/) (2020)
- [Factorizable Net: An Efficient Subgraph-based Framework for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11538/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Causal Adjustment Module for Debiasing Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17862/) (2025)
- [Head-Tail Cooperative Learning Network for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12048/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene graph generation aims to detect visual relationship triplets, (subject, predicate, object). Due to biases in data, current models tend to predict common predicates, e.g. "on" and "at", instead of informative ones, e.g. "standing on" and "looking at". This tendency results in the loss of precise information and overall performance. If a model only uses "stone on road" rather than "stone blocking road" to describe an image, it may be a grave misunderstanding. We argue that this phenomenon is caused by two imbalances: semantic space level imbalance and training sample level imbalance. For this problem, we propose DB-SGG, an effective framework based on debiasing but not the conventional distribution fitting. It integrates two components: Semantic Debiasing (SD) and Balanced Predicate Learning (BPL), for these imbalances. SD utilizes a confusion matrix and a bipartite graph to construct predicate relationships. BPL adopts a random undersampling strategy and an ambiguity removing strategy to focus on informative predicates. Benefiting from the model-agnostic process, our method can be easily applied to SGG models and outperforms Transformer by 136.3%, 119.5%, and 122.6% on mR@20 at three SGG sub-tasks on the SGG-VG dataset. Our method is further verified on another complex SGG dataset (SGG-GQA) and two downstream tasks (sentence-to-graph retrieval and image captioning).