LLM Meets Scene Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand and Generate Scene Graphs? A Benchmark and Empirical Study

Dongil Yang, Minjin Kim, Sunghwan Kim, Beong-woo Kwak, Minjun Park, Jinseok Hong, Woontack Woo, Jinyoung Yeo


Abstract
The remarkable reasoning and generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for their expanding applications in embodied AI, robotics, and other real-world tasks. To effectively support these applications, grounding in spatial and temporal understanding in multimodal environments is essential. To this end, recent works have leveraged scene graphs, a structured representation that encodes entities, attributes, and their relationships in a scene. However, a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs’ ability to utilize scene graphs remains limited. In this work, we introduce Text-Scene Graph (TSG) Bench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess LLMs’ ability to (1) understand scene graphs and (2) generate them from textual narratives. With TSG Bench we evaluate 11 LLMs and reveal that, while models perform well on scene graph understanding, they struggle with scene graph generation, particularly for complex narratives. Our analysis indicates that these models fail to effectively decompose discrete scenes from a complex narrative, leading to a bottleneck when generating scene graphs. These findings underscore the need for improved methodologies in scene graph generation and provide valuable insights for future research. The demonstration of our benchmark is available at https://tsg-bench.netlify.app. Additionally, our code and evaluation data are publicly available at https://github.com/docworlds/tsg-bench.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1036
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21335–21360
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1036/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongil Yang, Minjin Kim, Sunghwan Kim, Beong-woo Kwak, Minjun Park, Jinseok Hong, Woontack Woo, and Jinyoung Yeo. 2025. LLM Meets Scene Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand and Generate Scene Graphs? A Benchmark and Empirical Study. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 21335–21360, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM Meets Scene Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand and Generate Scene Graphs? A Benchmark and Empirical Study (Yang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1036.pdf