  We investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of
visual scenes. Our work analyzes the role of motifs: regularly appearing
substructures in scene graphs. We present new quantitative insights on such
repeated structures in the Visual Genome dataset. Our analysis shows that
object labels are highly predictive of relation labels but not vice-versa. We
also find that there are recurring patterns even in larger subgraphs: more than
50% of graphs contain motifs involving at least two relations. Our analysis
motivates a new baseline: given object detections, predict the most frequent
relation between object pairs with the given labels, as seen in the training
set. This baseline improves on the previous state-of-the-art by an average of
3.6% relative improvement across evaluation settings. We then introduce Stacked
Motif Networks, a new architecture designed to capture higher order motifs in
scene graphs that further improves over our strong baseline by an average 7.1%
relative gain. Our code is available at github.com/rowanz/neural-motifs.
