R3CD: Scene Graph to Image Generation with Relation-Aware Compositional Contrastive Control Diffusion

Abstract Image generation tasks have achieved remarkable performance using large-scale diffusion models. However, these models are limited to capturing the abstract relations (viz., interactions excluding positional relations) among multiple entities of complex scene graphs. Two main problems exist: 1) fail to depict more concise and accurate interactions via abstract relations; 2) fail to generate complete entities. To address that, we propose a novel Relation-aware Compositional Contrastive Control Diffusion method, dubbed as R3CD, that leverages large-scale diffusion models to learn abstract interactions from scene graphs. Herein, a scene graph transformer based on node and edge encoding is first designed to perceive both local and global information from input scene graphs, whose embeddings are initialized by a T5 model. Then a joint contrastive loss based on attention maps and denoising steps is developed to control the diffusion model to understand and further generate images, whose spatial structures and interaction features are consistent with a priori relation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets: Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff, and demonstrate that the proposal outperforms existing models both in quantitative and qualitative metrics to generate more realistic and diverse images according to different scene graph specifications.