Scalable Regularization of Scene Graph Generation Models using Symbolic Theories

Abstract: Several techniques have recently aimed to improve the performance of deep learning models for Scene Graph Generation (SGG) by incorporating background knowledge. State-of-the-art techniques can be divided into two families: one where the background knowledge is incorporated into the model in a subsymbolic fashion, and another in which the background knowledge is maintained in symbolic form. Despite promising results, both families of techniques face several shortcomings: the first one requires ad-hoc, more complex neural architectures increasing the training or inference cost; the second one suffers from limited scalability w.r.t. the size of the background knowledge. Our work introduces a regularization technique for injecting symbolic background knowledge into neural SGG models that overcomes the limitations of prior art. Our technique is model-agnostic, does not incur any cost at inference time, and scales to previously unmanageable background knowledge sizes. We demonstrate that our technique can improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art SGG models, by up to 33%.