Graph-Based Social Relation Reasoning

Human beings are fundamentally sociable—that we generally organize our social lives in terms of relations with other people. Understanding social relations from an image has great potential for intelligent systems such as social chatbots and personal assistants. In this paper, we propose a simpler, faster, and more accurate method named graph relational reasoning network (GR\(^2\)N) for social relation recognition. Different from existing methods which process all social relations on an image independently, our method considers the paradigm of jointly inferring the relations by constructing a social relation graph. Furthermore, the proposed GR\(^2\)N constructs several virtual relation graphs to explicitly grasp the strong logical constraints among different types of social relations. Experimental results illustrate that our method generates a reasonable and consistent social relation graph and improves the performance in both accuracy and efficiency.