# Joint Generative Modeling of Grounded Scene Graphs and Images via Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 82 of its 116 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [DiGress: Discrete Denoising diffusion for graph generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14734/) (2022)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [GraphRNN: Generating Realistic Graphs with Deep Auto-regressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08773/) (2018)
- [Analog Bits: Generating Discrete Data using Diffusion Models with Self-Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04202/) (2022)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [Image Generation from Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01622/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RETRO SYNFLOW: Discrete Flow Matching for Accurate and Diverse Single-Step Retrosynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04439/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Graph Generative Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15617/) (2024)
- [Dependency-Aware Discrete Diffusion for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09065/) (2026)
- [Panoptic Scene Program Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31780/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a framework for joint grounded scene graph - image generation, a challenging task involving high-dimensional, multi-modal structured data. To effectively model this complex joint distribution, we adopt a factorized approach: first generating a grounded scene graph, followed by image generation conditioned on the generated grounded scene graph. While conditional image generation has been widely explored in the literature, our primary focus is on the generation of grounded scene graphs from noise, which provides efficient and interpretable control over the image generation process. This task requires generating plausible grounded scene graphs with heterogeneous attributes for both nodes (objects) and edges (relations among objects), encompassing continuous attributes (e.g., object bounding boxes) and discrete attributes (e.g., object and relation categories). To address this challenge, we introduce DiffuseSG, a novel diffusion model that jointly models the heterogeneous node and edge attributes. We explore different encoding strategies to effectively handle the categorical data. Leveraging a graph transformer as the denoiser, DiffuseSG progressively refines grounded scene graph representations in a continuous space before discretizing them to generate structured outputs. Additionally, we introduce an IoU-based regularization term to enhance empirical performance. Our model outperforms existing methods in grounded scene graph generation on the VG and COCO-Stuff datasets, excelling in both standard and newly introduced metrics that more accurately capture the task's complexity. Furthermore, we demonstrate the broader applicability of DiffuseSG in two important downstream tasks: 1) achieving superior results in a range of grounded scene graph completion tasks, and 2) enhancing grounded scene graph detection models by leveraging additional training samples generated by DiffuseSG.