Through the PRISm: Importance-Aware Scene Graphs for Semantic Image Retrieval

Scene graph generation provides a compact structured representation for visual perception, but accurate and fast graph prediction from images and videos remains challenging. Recent VLM-based methods can generate scene graphs end-to-end as structured text, yet often produce long outputs with irrelevant objects and relations. We present SceneGraphVLM, a compact method for image and video scene graph generation with small visual language models. SceneGraphVLM serializes graphs in a token-efficient TOON format and trains the model in two stages: supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning with hallucination-aware rewards that balance relation coverage and precision while penalizing unsupported objects and relations. For videos, the model can optionally condition each frame on the previously generated graph, providing lightweight short-term context without tracking or post-processing. We evaluate SceneGraphVLM on PSG, PVSG, and Action Genome. With compact VLMs and vLLM-accelerated decoding, SceneGraphVLM achieves a strong quality-speed trade-off, improves precision-oriented SGG metrics while preserving reasonable recall, and generates complete scene graphs with approximately one-second latency. Code and implementation details are available at: https://github.com/markus0440/SceneGraphVLM.git.

Learning-driven Scene Graph Generation (SGG) models excel on frequent relation types but degrade sharply under annotation sparsity, failing to capture reliable visual commonsense knowledge. We propose a model-agnostic, semantically-guided knowledge refinement framework that systematically mines commonsense-grounded constraints from training data - capturing spatial, functional, and qualitative relational regularities - and uses general declarative commonsense reasoning to correct and refine ranked SGG predictions at inference time. The framework requires no manual rule authoring, no model retraining, and transfers across datasets and architectures. On three standard benchmarks, we obtain consistent improvements over strong baselines, demonstrating that structured visual commonsense reasoning over deep scene semantics is a practical and effective complement to purely learning-based scene graph generation.

Image retrieval has traditionally been formulated as a point-wise matching problem, where each candidate image is scored in isolation. However, this atomic paradigm fails to capture the complexity of human search intent within personal photo collections, where users often seek compact visual stories bound by structural relations rather than isolated snapshots. To address this limitation, we introduce Image Bundle Composition (IBC), a novel paradigm that shifts the objective from ranking individual images to dynamically composing cohesive image bundles from a massive, unstructured photo pool. Since target bundles are not predefined, IBC presents a severe combinatorial explosion challenge and demands modeling non-decomposable joint relevance. To establish this paradigm, we construct IBCBench, the first IBC benchmark dataset containing 109,467 images and 667 verified queries, built via a semi-automated verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose BundleWeaver, an agentic framework that reformulates IBC as query-conditioned incremental hyperedge discovery. By employing a Large Language Model to adaptively search for missing relational roles and utilizing a Vision-Language Model for whole-bundle verification, BundleWeaver effectively navigates the combinatorial space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art embedding models and static decompose-and-rerank paradigms suffer from relational blindness, BundleWeaver achieves substantial performance gains, highlighting the necessity of shifting from atomic scoring to dynamic relational composition. Our dataset and code are available.