Frequency-aware elastic prototype boundary learning for long-tailed scene graph generation

Abstract

<title>Abstract</title> Scene graph generation (SGG) addresses the task of detecting objects in an image and predicting the relationships among them. Although prototype-based methods have recently achieved clear progress on long-tailed SGG, fine-grained low-frequency predicates remain difficult to recognize because their relation features often exhibit larger intra-class variation and more dispersed distributions, making them easily confused with semantically similar high-frequency coarse-grained predicates under a unified prototype-matching rule. To alleviate this issue, we propose a frequency-aware elastic prototype boundary learning framework, termed SGE-Net. Under fixed relation prototypes, the framework learns relation-category-specific boundary scales through explicit frequency compensation and frequency-adaptive virtual sampling, so that relation prediction can exploit not only prototype-center matching but also category-dependent decision-boundary information. During inference, we further introduce elastic boundary-aware distance calibration, enabling the boundary information learned during training to better distinguish relation categories that are easily confused under prototype matching. In addition, we combine visual and semantic features with dynamic gating to provide more reliable relation features for the above boundary learning. Experiments and analyses on Visual Genome and Open Images V6 demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent gains in both long-tailed relation prediction and overall evaluation metrics.