Papers › Explanation-based Weakly-supervised Learning of Visual Relations with Graph Networks
Explanation-based Weakly-supervised Learning of Visual Relations with Graph Networks
Federico Baldassarre, Kevin Smith, Josephine Sullivan, Hossein Azizpour
Visual relationship detection is fundamental for holistic image understanding. However, localizing and classifying (subject, predicate, object) triplets constitutes a hard learning objective due to the combinatorial explosion of possible relationships, their long-tail distribution in natural images, and an expensive annotation process. This paper introduces a novel weakly-supervised method for visual relationship detection that relies only on image-level predicate annotations. A graph neural network is trained to classify the predicates in an image from the graph representation of all objects, implicitly encoding an inductive bias for pairwise relationships. We then frame relationship detection as the explanation of such a predicate classifier, i.e. we reconstruct a complete relationship by recovering the subject and the object of a predicted predicate. Using this novel technique and minimal labels, we present comparable results to recent fully-supervised and weakly-supervised methods on three diverse and challenging datasets: HICO-DET for human-object interaction, Visual Relationship Detection for generic object-to-object relationships, and UnRel for unusual relationships.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections