English

Multi-hop Relational Contrastive Learning: Extending Spatial Contrastive Pre-training Beyond Pairwise Relations

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-19 v1

Abstract

Understanding how objects relate to each other in space is fundamental to scene understanding, yet most contrastive pre-training approaches only model pairwise relationships, leaving richer compositional and multi-hop interactions largely unexplored. We introduce Multi-Hop Relational Contrastive Learning (MRCL), a framework that extends spatial contrastive learning to graph-structured scene representations. By tracing k-hop paths through scene graphs built from detected objects, MRCL captures implicit spatial dependencies that go well beyond what direct object pairs can express. We define a multi-level contrastive objective spanning nodes, edges, and multi-hop paths, encouraging embeddings that remain stable across object semantics while staying responsive to spatial layout. On a GQA subset, MRCL produces spatially-aware representations that improve content-based graph retrieval (NDCG@5 = 0.748) and consistently benefit downstream tasks, including spatial relationship recognition and graph-based question answering. Together, these results suggest that multi-hop relational supervision offers substantially richer structural guidance than pairwise-only methods, leading to visual representations that are more robust, compositional, and geometry-aware.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.16456,
  title  = {Multi-hop Relational Contrastive Learning: Extending Spatial Contrastive Pre-training Beyond Pairwise Relations},
  author = {Sheikh Tanvir Ahmed and Md. Tanvir Raihan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16456},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:15:28.430Z