# Scene Graph Generation with Role-Playing Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 92 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07403/) (2025)
- [Human-Object Interaction Detection Collaborated with Large Relation-driven Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20155/) (2024)
- [Optimizing Sequential Multi-Step Tasks with Parallel LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08944/) (2025)
- [DIFFVSGG: Diffusion-Driven Online Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13957/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Visual Genome](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07643/) (2025)
- [PRISM-0: A Predicate-Rich Scene Graph Generation Framework for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00844/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction as Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18357/) (2025)
- [OmniGaze: Reward-inspired Generalizable Gaze Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13660/) (2025)
- [SinkTrack: Attention Sink based Context Anchoring for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10027/) (2026)
- [A Reverse Causal Framework to Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Debiasing Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23451/) (2025)
- [Language-Driven Object-Oriented Two-Stage Method for Scene Graph Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05661/) (2025)
- [Integrating Graphs, Large Language Models, and Agents: Reasoning and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15951/) (2026)
- [MSGFusion: Multimodal Scene Graph-Guided Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12901/) (2025)
- [Interaction-Centric Knowledge Infusion and Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05935/) (2025)
- [CAGE-SGG: Counterfactual Active Graph Evidence for Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22274/) (2026)
- [SceneGraphGrounder: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Structured Scene Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21788/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current approaches for open-vocabulary scene graph generation (OVSGG) use vision-language models such as CLIP and follow a standard zero-shot pipeline -- computing similarity between the query image and the text embeddings for each category (i.e., text classifiers). In this work, we argue that the text classifiers adopted by existing OVSGG methods, i.e., category-/part-level prompts, are scene-agnostic as they remain unchanged across contexts. Using such fixed text classifiers not only struggles to model visual relations with high variance, but also falls short in adapting to distinct contexts. To plug these intrinsic shortcomings, we devise SDSGG, a scene-specific description based OVSGG framework where the weights of text classifiers are adaptively adjusted according to the visual content. In particular, to generate comprehensive and diverse descriptions oriented to the scene, an LLM is asked to play different roles (e.g., biologist and engineer) to analyze and discuss the descriptive features of a given scene from different views. Unlike previous efforts simply treating the generated descriptions as mutually equivalent text classifiers, SDSGG is equipped with an advanced renormalization mechanism to adjust the influence of each text classifier based on its relevance to the presented scene (this is what the term "specific" means). Furthermore, to capture the complicated interplay between subjects and objects, we propose a new lightweight module called mutual visual adapter. It refines CLIP's ability to recognize relations by learning an interaction-aware semantic space. Extensive experiments on prevalent benchmarks show that SDSGG outperforms top-leading methods by a clear margin.
