# SceneProp: Combining Neural Network and Markov Random Field for Scene-Graph Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00936 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00936/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 33 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 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 33)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06242/) (2023)
- [Image Generation from Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01622/) (2018)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose Dynamic Tree Structures for Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01880/) (2018)
- [Bipartite Graph Network with Adaptive Message Passing for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00308/) (2021)
- [Visual Semantic Navigation using Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06543/) (2018)
- [Grounding DINO 1.5: Advance the "Edge" of Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10300/) (2024)
- [Learning by Abstraction: The Neural State Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03950/) (2019)
- [Energy-Based Learning for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02221/) (2021)
- [T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14610/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Planning for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Geometric and Symbolic Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07277/) (2020)
- [Semantic Image Manipulation Using Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03677/) (2020)
- [GQA: A New Dataset for Real-World Visual Reasoning and Compositional Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09506/) (2019)
- [Cross-modal Scene Graph Matching for Relationship-aware Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05134/) (2019)
- [DetCLIPv3: Towards Versatile Generative Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09216/) (2024)
- [EGTR: Extracting Graph from Transformer for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02072/) (2024)
- [Neural Markov Random Field for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11193/) (2024)
- [Neural Enhanced Belief Propagation for Multiobject Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08340/) (2022)
- [DSGG: Dense Relation Transformer for an End-to-end Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14886/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grounding complex, compositional visual queries with multiple objects and relationships is a fundamental challenge for vision-language models. While standard phrase grounding methods excel at localizing single objects, they lack the structural inductive bias to parse intricate relational descriptions, often failing as queries become more descriptive. To address this structural deficit, we focus on scene-graph grounding, a powerful but less-explored formulation where the query is an explicit graph of objects and their relationships. However, existing methods for this task also struggle, paradoxically showing decreased performance as the query graph grows -- failing to leverage the very information that should make grounding easier. We introduce SceneProp, a novel method that resolves this issue by reformulating scene-graph grounding as a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) inference problem in a Markov Random Field (MRF). By performing global inference over the entire query graph, SceneProp finds the optimal assignment of image regions to nodes that jointly satisfies all constraints. This is achieved within an end-to-end framework via a differentiable implementation of the Belief Propagation algorithm. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our dedicated focus on the scene-graph grounding formulation allows SceneProp to significantly outperform prior work. Critically, its accuracy consistently improves with the size and complexity of the query graph, demonstrating for the first time that more relational context can, and should, lead to better grounding. Codes are available at https://github.com/keitaotani/SceneProp.