Adaptive Visual Scene Understanding: Incremental Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation (SGG) involves analyzing images to extract meaningful information about objects and their relationships. Given the dynamic nature of the visual world, it becomes crucial for AI systems to detect new objects and establish their new relationships with existing objects. To address the lack of continual learning methodologies in SGG, we introduce the comprehensive Continual ScenE Graph Generation (CSEGG) dataset along with 3 learning scenarios and 8 evaluation metrics. Our research investigates the continual learning performances of existing SGG methods on the retention of previous object entities and relationships as they learn new ones. Moreover, we also explore how continual object detection enhances generalization in classifying known relationships on unknown objects. We conduct extensive experiments benchmarking and analyzing the classical two-stage SGG methods and the most recent transformer-based SGG methods in continual learning settings, and gain valuable insights into the CSEGG problem. We invite the research community to explore this emerging field of study.