Open World Scene Graph Generation using Vision Language Models
This addresses the limitation of dataset-specific supervision in scene graph generation, enabling broader applicability in real-world scenarios, though it builds incrementally on existing vision language model capabilities.
The paper tackles the problem of scene graph generation in open-world settings with novel objects and relations, introducing a training-free framework that uses vision language models to achieve zero-shot structured reasoning, demonstrating performance on datasets like Visual Genome without task-specific training.
Scene-Graph Generation (SGG) seeks to recognize objects in an image and distill their salient pairwise relationships. Most methods depend on dataset-specific supervision to learn the variety of interactions, restricting their usefulness in open-world settings, involving novel objects and/or relations. Even methods that leverage large Vision Language Models (VLMs) typically require benchmark-specific fine-tuning. We introduce Open-World SGG, a training-free, efficient, model-agnostic framework that taps directly into the pretrained knowledge of VLMs to produce scene graphs with zero additional learning. Casting SGG as a zero-shot structured-reasoning problem, our method combines multimodal prompting, embedding alignment, and a lightweight pair-refinement strategy, enabling inference over unseen object vocabularies and relation sets. To assess this setting, we formalize an Open-World evaluation protocol that measures performance when no SGG-specific data have been observed either in terms of objects and relations. Experiments on Visual Genome, Open Images V6, and the Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) dataset demonstrate the capacity of pretrained VLMs to perform relational understanding without task-level training.