Abstract 

Machine understanding of complex images is a key goal of artificial intelligence. One challenge underlying this task is that visual scenes contain multiple interrelated objects, and that global context plays an important role in interpreting the scene. A natural modeling framework for capturing such effects is structured prediction, which optimizes over complex labels, while modeling within-label interactions. However, it is unclear what principles should guide the design of a structured prediction model that utilizes the power of deep learning components. Here we propose a design principle for such architectures that follows from a natural requirement of permutation invariance. We prove a necessary and sufficient characterization for architectures that follow this invariance, and discuss its implication on model design. Finally, we show that the resulting model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Visual Genome scene-graph labeling benchmark, outperforming all recent approaches.