  We present a novel self-supervised approach for representation learning,
particularly for the task of Visual Relationship Detection (VRD). Motivated by
the effectiveness of Masked Image Modeling (MIM), we propose Masked Bounding
Box Reconstruction (MBBR), a variation of MIM where a percentage of the
entities/objects within a scene are masked and subsequently reconstructed based
on the unmasked objects. The core idea is that, through object-level masked
modeling, the network learns context-aware representations that capture the
interaction of objects within a scene and thus are highly predictive of visual
object relationships. We extensively evaluate learned representations, both
qualitatively and quantitatively, in a few-shot setting and demonstrate the
efficacy of MBBR for learning robust visual representations, particularly
tailored for VRD. The proposed method is able to surpass state-of-the-art VRD
methods on the Predicate Detection (PredDet) evaluation setting, using only a
few annotated samples. We make our code available at
https://github.com/deeplab-ai/SelfSupervisedVRD.
