  Large scale visual understanding is challenging, as it requires a model to
handle the widely-spread and imbalanced distribution of <subject, relation,
object> triples. In real-world scenarios with large numbers of objects and
relations, some are seen very commonly while others are barely seen. We develop
a new relationship detection model that embeds objects and relations into two
vector spaces where both discriminative capability and semantic affinity are
preserved. We learn both a visual and a semantic module that map features from
the two modalities into a shared space, where matched pairs of features have to
discriminate against those unmatched, but also maintain close distances to
semantically similar ones. Benefiting from that, our model can achieve superior
performance even when the visual entity categories scale up to more than
80,000, with extremely skewed class distribution. We demonstrate the efficacy
of our model on a large and imbalanced benchmark based of Visual Genome that
comprises 53,000+ objects and 29,000+ relations, a scale at which no previous
work has ever been evaluated at. We show superiority of our model over
carefully designed baselines on the original Visual Genome dataset with 80,000+
categories. We also show state-of-the-art performance on the VRD dataset and
the scene graph dataset which is a subset of Visual Genome with 200 categories.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition