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.
Graph generation with Machine Learning is an open problem with applications in various research fields. In this work, we propose to cast the generative process of a graph into a sequential one, relying on a node ordering procedure. We use this sequential process to design a novel generative model composed of two recurrent neural networks that learn to predict the edges of graphs: the first network generates one endpoint of each edge, while the second network generates the other endpoint conditioned on the state of the first. We test our approach extensively on five different datasets, comparing with two well-known baselines coming from graph literature, and two recurrent approaches, one of which holds state of the art performances. Evaluation is conducted considering quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the generated samples. Results show that our approach is able to yield novel, and unique graphs originating from very different distributions, while retaining structural properties very similar to those in the training sample. Under the proposed evaluation framework, our approach is able to reach performances comparable to the current state of the art on the graph generation task.
Molecular graph generation is a fundamental problem for drug discovery and has been attracting growing attention. The problem is challenging since it requires not only generating chemically valid molecular structures but also optimizing their chemical properties in the meantime. Inspired by the recent progress in deep generative models, in this paper we propose a flow-based autoregressive model for graph generation called GraphAF. GraphAF combines the advantages of both autoregressive and flow-based approaches and enjoys: (1) high model flexibility for data density estimation; (2) efficient parallel computation for training; (3) an iterative sampling process, which allows leveraging chemical domain knowledge for valency checking. Experimental results show that GraphAF is able to generate 68% chemically valid molecules even without chemical knowledge rules and 100% valid molecules with chemical rules. The training process of GraphAF is two times faster than the existing state-of-the-art approach GCPN. After fine-tuning the model for goal-directed property optimization with reinforcement learning, GraphAF achieves state-of-the-art performance on both chemical property optimization and constrained property optimization.
Graph generative models have been extensively studied in the data mining literature. While traditional techniques are based on generating structures that adhere to a pre-decided distribution, recent techniques have shifted towards learning this distribution directly from the data. While learning-based approaches have imparted significant improvement in quality, some limitations remain to be addressed. First, learning graph distributions introduces additional computational overhead, which limits their scalability to large graph databases. Second, many techniques only learn the structure and do not address the need to also learn node and edge labels, which encode important semantic information and influence the structure itself. Third, existing techniques often incorporate domain-specific rules and lack generalizability. Fourth, the experimentation of existing techniques is not comprehensive enough due to either using weak evaluation metrics or focusing primarily on synthetic or small datasets. In this work, we develop a domain-agnostic technique called GraphGen to overcome all of these limitations. GraphGen converts graphs to sequences using minimum DFS codes. Minimum DFS codes are canonical labels and capture the graph structure precisely along with the label information. The complex joint distributions between structure and semantic labels are learned through a novel LSTM architecture. Extensive experiments on million-sized, real graph datasets show GraphGen to be 4 times faster on average than state-of-the-art techniques while being significantly better in quality across a comprehensive set of 11 different metrics. Our code is released at https://github.com/idea-iitd/graphgen.
Semantic image understanding is a challenging topic in computer vision. It requires to detect all objects in an image, but also to identify all the relations between them. Detected objects, their labels and the discovered relations can be used to construct a scene graph which provides an abstract semantic interpretation of an image. In previous works, relations were identified by solving an assignment problem formulated as Mixed-Integer Linear Programs. In this work, we interpret that formulation as Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). The proposed architecture performs scene graph inference by solving a neural variant of an ODE by end-to-end learning. It achieves state-of-the-art results on all three benchmark tasks: scene graph generation (SGGen), classification (SGCls) and visual relationship detection (PredCls) on Visual Genome benchmark.
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract entities, predicates and their semantic structure from images, enabling deep understanding of visual content, with many applications such as visual reasoning and image retrieval. Nevertheless, existing SGG methods require millions of manually annotated bounding boxes for training, and are computationally inefficient, as they exhaustively process all pairs of object proposals to detect predicates. In this paper, we address those two limitations by first proposing a generalized formulation of SGG, namely Visual Semantic Parsing, which disentangles entity and predicate recognition, and enables sub-quadratic performance. Then we propose the Visual Semantic Parsing Network, VSPNet, based on a dynamic, attention-based, bipartite message passing framework that jointly infers graph nodes and edges through an iterative process. Additionally, we propose the first graph-based weakly supervised learning framework, based on a novel graph alignment algorithm, which enables training without bounding box annotations. Through extensive experiments, we show that VSPNet outperforms weakly supervised baselines significantly and approaches fully supervised performance, while being several times faster. We publicly release the source code of our method.
Scene graphs are powerful representations that parse images into their abstract semantic elements, i.e., objects and their interactions, which facilitates visual comprehension and explainable reasoning. On the other hand, commonsense knowledge graphs are rich repositories that encode how the world is structured, and how general concepts interact. In this paper, we present a unified formulation of these two constructs, where a scene graph is seen as an image-conditioned instantiation of a commonsense knowledge graph. Based on this new perspective, we re-formulate scene graph generation as the inference of a bridge between the scene and commonsense graphs, where each entity or predicate instance in the scene graph has to be linked to its corresponding entity or predicate class in the commonsense graph. To this end, we propose a novel graph-based neural network that iteratively propagates information between the two graphs, as well as within each of them, while gradually refining their bridge in each iteration. Our Graph Bridging Network, GB-Net, successively infers edges and nodes, allowing to simultaneously exploit and refine the rich, heterogeneous structure of the interconnected scene and commonsense graphs. Through extensive experimentation, we showcase the superior accuracy of GB-Net compared to the most recent methods, resulting in a new state of the art. We publicly release the source code of our method.
Deep generative models for graphs have shown great promise in the area of drug design, but have so far found little application beyond generating graph-structured molecules. In this work, we demonstrate a proof of concept for the challenging task of road network extraction from image data. This task can be framed as image-conditioned graph generation, for which we develop the Generative Graph Transformer (GGT), a deep autoregressive model that makes use of attention mechanisms for image conditioning and the recurrent generation of graphs. We benchmark GGT on the application of road network extraction from semantic segmentation data. For this, we introduce the Toulouse Road Network dataset, based on real-world publicly-available data. We further propose the StreetMover distance: a metric based on the Sinkhorn distance for effectively evaluating the quality of road network generation. The code and dataset are publicly available.
We propose a new family of efficient and expressive deep generative models of graphs, called Graph Recurrent Attention Networks (GRANs). Our model generates graphs one block of nodes and associated edges at a time. The block size and sampling stride allow us to trade off sample quality for efficiency. Compared to previous RNN-based graph generative models, our framework better captures the auto-regressive conditioning between the already-generated and to-be-generated parts of the graph using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with attention. This not only reduces the dependency on node ordering but also bypasses the long-term bottleneck caused by the sequential nature of RNNs. Moreover, we parameterize the output distribution per block using a mixture of Bernoulli, which captures the correlations among generated edges within the block. Finally, we propose to handle node orderings in generation by marginalizing over a family of canonical orderings. On standard benchmarks, we achieve state-of-the-art time efficiency and sample quality compared to previous models. Additionally, we show our model is capable of generating large graphs of up to 5K nodes with good quality. To the best of our knowledge, GRAN is the first deep graph generative model that can scale to this size. Our code is released at: https://github.com/lrjconan/GRAN.
Zero-shot and few-shot learning aim to improve generalization to unseen concepts, which are promising in many realistic scenarios. Due to the lack of data in unseen domain, relation modeling between seen and unseen domains is vital for knowledge transfer in these tasks. Most existing methods capture seen-unseen relation implicitly via semantic embedding or feature generation, resulting in inadequate use of relation and some issues remain (e.g. domain shift). To tackle these challenges, we propose a Transferable Graph Generation (TGG) approach, in which the relation is modeled and utilized explicitly via graph generation. Specifically, our proposed TGG contains two main components: (1) Graph generation for relation modeling. An attention-based aggregate network and a relation kernel are proposed, which generate instance-level graph based on a class-level prototype graph and visual features. Proximity information aggregating is guided by a multi-head graph attention mechanism, where seen and unseen features synthesized by GAN are revised as node embeddings. The relation kernel further generates edges with GCN and graph kernel method, to capture instance-level topological structure while tackling data imbalance and noise. (2) Relation propagation for relation utilization. A dual relation propagation approach is proposed, where relations captured by the generated graph are separately propagated from the seen and unseen subgraphs. The two propagations learn from each other in a dual learning fashion, which performs as an adaptation way for mitigating domain shift. All components are jointly optimized with a meta-learning strategy, and our TGG acts as an end-to-end framework unifying conventional zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few-shot learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it consistently surpasses existing methods of the above three fields by a significant margin.
To deepen our understanding of graph neural networks, we investigate the representation power of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) through the looking glass of graph moments, a key property of graph topology encoding path of various lengths. We find that GCNs are rather restrictive in learning graph moments. Without careful design, GCNs can fail miserably even with multiple layers and nonlinear activation functions. We analyze theoretically the expressiveness of GCNs, concluding a modular GCN design, using different propagation rules with residual connections could significantly improve the performance of GCN. We demonstrate that such modular designs are capable of distinguishing graphs from different graph generation models for surprisingly small graphs, a notoriously difficult problem in network science. Our investigation suggests that, depth is much more influential than width, with deeper GCNs being more capable of learning higher order graph moments. Additionally, combining GCN modules with different propagation rules is critical to the representation power of GCNs.
We propose the Limited Multi-Label (LML) projection layer as a new primitive operation for end-to-end learning systems. The LML layer provides a probabilistic way of modeling multi-label predictions limited to having exactly k labels. We derive efficient forward and backward passes for this layer and show how the layer can be used to optimize the top-k recall for multi-label tasks with incomplete label information. We evaluate LML layers on top-k CIFAR-100 classification and scene graph generation. We show that LML layers add a negligible amount of computational overhead, strictly improve the model's representational capacity, and improve accuracy. We also revisit the truncated top-k entropy method as a competitive baseline for top-k classification.
We propose GraphNVP, the first invertible, normalizing flow-based molecular graph generation model. We decompose the generation of a graph into two steps: generation of (i) an adjacency tensor and (ii) node attributes. This decomposition yields the exact likelihood maximization on graph-structured data, combined with two novel reversible flows. We empirically demonstrate that our model efficiently generates valid molecular graphs with almost no duplicated molecules. In addition, we observe that the learned latent space can be used to generate molecules with desired chemical properties.
To understand a scene in depth not only involves locating/recognizing individual objects, but also requires to infer the relationships and interactions among them. However, since the distribution of real-world relationships is seriously unbalanced, existing methods perform quite poorly for the less frequent relationships. In this work, we find that the statistical correlations between object pairs and their relationships can effectively regularize semantic space and make prediction less ambiguous, and thus well address the unbalanced distribution issue. To achieve this, we incorporate these statistical correlations into deep neural networks to facilitate scene graph generation by developing a Knowledge-Embedded Routing Network. More specifically, we show that the statistical correlations between objects appearing in images and their relationships, can be explicitly represented by a structured knowledge graph, and a routing mechanism is learned to propagate messages through the graph to explore their interactions. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Visual Genome dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over current state-of-the-art competitors.
Generative networks have made it possible to generate meaningful signals such as images and texts from simple noise. Recently, generative methods based on GAN and VAE were developed for graphs and graph signals. However, the mathematical properties of these methods are unclear, and training good generative models is difficult. This work proposes a graph generation model that uses a recent adaptation of Mallat's scattering transform to graphs. The proposed model is naturally composed of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder is a Gaussianized graph scattering transform, which is robust to signal and graph manipulation. The decoder is a simple fully connected network that is adapted to specific tasks, such as link prediction, signal generation on graphs and full graph and signal generation. The training of our proposed system is efficient since it is only applied to the decoder and the hardware requirements are moderate. Numerical results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed system for both link prediction and graph and signal generation.
This paper proposes a neural semantic parsing approach -- Sequence-to-Action, which models semantic parsing as an end-to-end semantic graph generation process. Our method simultaneously leverages the advantages from two recent promising directions of semantic parsing. Firstly, our model uses a semantic graph to represent the meaning of a sentence, which has a tight-coupling with knowledge bases. Secondly, by leveraging the powerful representation learning and prediction ability of neural network models, we propose a RNN model which can effectively map sentences to action sequences for semantic graph generation. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on OVERNIGHT dataset and gets competitive performance on GEO and ATIS datasets.
This paper addresses the following basic question: given two layouts of the same graph, which one is more aesthetically pleasing? We propose a neural network-based discriminator model trained on a labeled dataset that decides which of two layouts has a higher aesthetic quality. The feature vectors used as inputs to the model are based on known graph drawing quality metrics, classical statistics, information-theoretical quantities, and two-point statistics inspired by methods of condensed matter physics. The large corpus of layout pairs used for training and testing is constructed using force-directed drawing algorithms and the layouts that naturally stem from the process of graph generation. It is further extended using data augmentation techniques. The mean prediction accuracy of our model is 95.70%, outperforming discriminators based on stress and on the linear combination of popular quality metrics by a statistically significant margin.
Recent approaches on visual scene understanding attempt to build a scene graph -- a computational representation of objects and their pairwise relationships. Such rich semantic representation is very appealing, yet difficult to obtain from a single image, especially when considering complex spatial arrangements in the scene. Differently, an image sequence conveys useful information using the multi-view geometric relations arising from camera motion. Indeed, in such cases, object relationships are naturally related to the 3D scene structure. To this end, this paper proposes a system that first computes the geometrical location of objects in a generic scene and then efficiently constructs scene graphs from video by embedding such geometrical reasoning. Such compelling representation is obtained using a new model where geometric and visual features are merged using an RNN framework. We report results on a dataset we created for the task of 3D scene graph generation in multiple views.
Generating scene graph to describe all the relations inside an image gains increasing interests these years. However, most of the previous methods use complicated structures with slow inference speed or rely on the external data, which limits the usage of the model in real-life scenarios. To improve the efficiency of scene graph generation, we propose a subgraph-based connection graph to concisely represent the scene graph during the inference. A bottom-up clustering method is first used to factorize the entire scene graph into subgraphs, where each subgraph contains several objects and a subset of their relationships. By replacing the numerous relationship representations of the scene graph with fewer subgraph and object features, the computation in the intermediate stage is significantly reduced. In addition, spatial information is maintained by the subgraph features, which is leveraged by our proposed Spatial-weighted Message Passing~(SMP) structure and Spatial-sensitive Relation Inference~(SRI) module to facilitate the relationship recognition. On the recent Visual Relationship Detection and Visual Genome datasets, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both accuracy and speed.
Neural node embeddings have recently emerged as a powerful representation for supervised learning tasks involving graph-structured data. We leverage this recent advance to develop a novel algorithm for unsupervised community discovery in graphs. Through extensive experimental studies on simulated and real-world data, we demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves over the current state-of-the-art. Specifically, our approach empirically attains the information-theoretic limits for community recovery under the benchmark Stochastic Block Models for graph generation and exhibits better stability and accuracy over both Spectral Clustering and Acyclic Belief Propagation in the community recovery limits.