Tensor Composition Net for Visual Relationship Prediction

We present a novel Tensor Composition Net (TCN) to predict visual relationships in images. Visual Relationship Prediction (VRP) provides a more challenging test of image understanding than conventional image tagging and is difficult to learn due to a large label-space and incomplete annotation. The key idea of our TCN is to exploit the low-rank property of the visual relationship tensor, so as to leverage correlations within and across objects and relations and make a structured prediction of all visual relationships in an image. To show the effectiveness of our model, we first empirically compare our model with Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC) methods, eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) methods, and VRD methods. We then show that thanks to our tensor (de)composition layer, our model can predict visual relationships which have not been seen in the training dataset. We finally show our TCN's image-level visual relationship prediction provides a simple and efficient mechanism for relation-based image-retrieval even compared with VRD methods.