Learning Predicates as Functions to Enable Few-shot Scene Graph Prediction

Abstract: Scene graph prediction --- classifying the set of objects and predicates in a visual scene --- requires substantial training data. However, most predicates only occur a handful of times making them difficult to learn. We introduce the first scene graph prediction model that supports few-shot learning of predicates. Existing scene graph generation models represent objects using pretrained object detectors or word embeddings that capture semantic object information at the cost of encoding information about which relationships they afford. So, these object representations are unable to generalize to new few-shot relationships. We introduce a framework that induces object representations that are structured according to their visual relationships. Unlike past methods, our framework embeds objects that afford similar relationships closer together. This property allows our model to perform well in the few-shot setting. For example, applying the 'riding' predicate transformation to 'person' modifies the representation towards objects like 'skateboard' and 'horse' that enable riding. We generate object representations by learning predicates trained as message passing functions within a new graph convolution framework. The object representations are used to build few-shot predicate classifiers for rare predicates with as few as 1 labeled example. We achieve a 5-shot performance of 22.70 recall@50, a 3.7 increase when compared to strong transfer learning baselines.