Papers › Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training

Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training

27 Feb 2020CVPR 2020 6arXiv:2002.11949archive 2025-07-28

Kaihua Tang, Yulei Niu, Jianqiang Huang, Jiaxin Shi, Hanwang Zhang

Today's scene graph generation (SGG) task is still far from practical, mainly due to the severe training bias, e.g., collapsing diverse "human walk on / sit on / lay on beach" into "human on beach". Given such SGG, the down-stream tasks such as VQA can hardly infer better scene structures than merely a bag of objects. However, debiasing in SGG is not trivial because traditional debiasing methods cannot distinguish between the good and bad bias, e.g., good context prior (e.g., "person read book" rather than "eat") and bad long-tailed bias (e.g., "near" dominating "behind / in front of"). In this paper, we present a novel SGG framework based on causal inference but not the conventional likelihood. We first build a causal graph for SGG, and perform traditional biased training with the graph. Then, we propose to draw the counterfactual causality from the trained graph to infer the effect from the bad bias, which should be removed. In particular, we use Total Direct Effect (TDE) as the proposed final predicate score for unbiased SGG. Note that our framework is agnostic to any SGG model and thus can be widely applied in the community who seeks unbiased predictions. By using the proposed Scene Graph Diagnosis toolkit on the SGG benchmark Visual Genome and several prevailing models, we observed significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art methods.

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KaihuaTang/Scene-Graph-Benchmark.pytorch officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
Karim-53/SGG mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
ihaeyong/unbiased-sgg mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
jaleedkhan/jSGG mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
zacharie12/zacharie mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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2ran · our draft was wrong
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entropy_loss KaihuaTang/Scene-Graph-Benchmark.pytorch/maskrcnn_benchmark/layers/entropy_loss.py official repository unverified MIT recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · 2d943c0c96e61f16 · report
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build_roi_relation_head ihaeyong/unbiased-sgg/maskrcnn_benchmark/modeling/roi_heads/relation_head/relation_head.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong licence not identified · pointer only · 32a2dca6019370be · report
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Tasks

Causal InferenceGraph GenerationScene Graph GenerationUnbiased Scene Graph Generation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome Causal-TDE Recall@50 31.93 #3 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome Causal-TDE mean Recall @20 6.9 #3 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) F@100 36.9 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) mR@20 19.2 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) ng-mR@20 20.9 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) F@100 37.2 #10 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) mR@20 17.4 #10 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; PredCls mode) ng-mR@20 18.7 #10 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) F@100 18.6 #16 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) mR@20 11.2 #16 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) ng-mR@20 12.4 #16 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) F@100 19.9 #19 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) mR@20 9.9 #19 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGCls mode) ng-mR@20 10.7 #19 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) F@100 15.1 #23 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) mR@20 6.8 #23 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (VCTree-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) ng-mR@20 7.8 #23 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) F@100 13.2 #24 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) mR@20 9.7 #24 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation Visual Genome TDE (MOTIFS-ResNeXt-101-FPN backbone; SGDet mode) ng-mR@20 7.4 #24 of 31 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Causal inference

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