  Scene graph generation aims to identify objects and their relations in
images, providing structured image representations that can facilitate numerous
applications in computer vision. However, scene graph models usually require
supervised learning on large quantities of labeled data with intensive human
annotation. In this work, we propose visual distant supervision, a novel
paradigm of visual relation learning, which can train scene graph models
without any human-labeled data. The intuition is that by aligning commonsense
knowledge bases and images, we can automatically create large-scale labeled
data to provide distant supervision for visual relation learning. To alleviate
the noise in distantly labeled data, we further propose a framework that
iteratively estimates the probabilistic relation labels and eliminates the
noisy ones. Comprehensive experimental results show that our distantly
supervised model outperforms strong weakly supervised and semi-supervised
baselines. By further incorporating human-labeled data in a semi-supervised
fashion, our model outperforms state-of-the-art fully supervised models by a
large margin (e.g., 8.6 micro- and 7.6 macro-recall@50 improvements for
predicate classification in Visual Genome evaluation). All the data and code
will be available to facilitate future research.
