# Open World Scene Graph Generation using Vision Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## 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 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (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)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Graph-Structured Representations for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05600/) (2016)
- [Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11247/) (2022)
- [SGTR: End-to-end Scene Graph Generation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12970/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scene Graph Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01072/) (2020)
- [Structured Sparse R-CNN for Direct Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10815/) (2021)
- [From Pixels to Graphs: Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00906/) (2024)
- [Visually-Prompted Language Model for Fine-Grained Scene Graph Generation in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13233/) (2023)
- [Expanding Scene Graph Boundaries: Fully Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Concept Alignment and Retention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10988/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Graph is a Substrate Across Data Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22384/) (2026)
- [360deg Image Perception with MLLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and a Training-Free Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16179/) (2026)
- [VOST-SGG: VLM-Aided One-Stage Spatio-Temporal Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05524/) (2025)
- [SceneGraphVLM: Dynamic Scene Graph Generation from Video with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13667/) (2026)
- [SGR3 Model: Scene Graph Retrieval-Reasoning Model in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04614/) (2026)
- [GraphVid: Interactive Graph-Controllable Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21580/) (2026)
- [Modeling Scientific Experiment Scenes: Dataset and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02892/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene-Graph Generation (SGG) seeks to recognize objects in an image and distill their salient pairwise relationships. Most methods depend on dataset-specific supervision to learn the variety of interactions, restricting their usefulness in open-world settings, involving novel objects and/or relations. Even methods that leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically require benchmark-specific fine-tuning. We introduce Open-World SGG, a training-free, efficient, model-agnostic framework that taps directly into the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to produce scene graphs with zero additional learning. Casting SGG as a zero-shot structured-reasoning problem, our method combines multimodal prompting, embedding alignment, and a lightweight pair-refinement strategy, enabling inference over unseen object vocabularies and relation sets. To assess this setting, we formalize an Open-World evaluation protocol that measures performance when no SGG-specific data have been observed either in terms of objects and relations. Experiments on Visual Genome, Open Images V6, and the Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) dataset demonstrate the capacity of pretrained VLMs to perform relational understanding without task-level training.