  By taking the semantic object parsing task as an exemplar application
scenario, we propose the Graph Long Short-Term Memory (Graph LSTM) network,
which is the generalization of LSTM from sequential data or multi-dimensional
data to general graph-structured data. Particularly, instead of evenly and
fixedly dividing an image to pixels or patches in existing multi-dimensional
LSTM structures (e.g., Row, Grid and Diagonal LSTMs), we take each
arbitrary-shaped superpixel as a semantically consistent node, and adaptively
construct an undirected graph for each image, where the spatial relations of
the superpixels are naturally used as edges. Constructed on such an adaptive
graph topology, the Graph LSTM is more naturally aligned with the visual
patterns in the image (e.g., object boundaries or appearance similarities) and
provides a more economical information propagation route. Furthermore, for each
optimization step over Graph LSTM, we propose to use a confidence-driven scheme
to update the hidden and memory states of nodes progressively till all nodes
are updated. In addition, for each node, the forgets gates are adaptively
learned to capture different degrees of semantic correlation with neighboring
nodes. Comprehensive evaluations on four diverse semantic object parsing
datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Graph LSTM over
other state-of-the-art solutions.
