Perception

Scene Graph

A scene graph is a structured representation of a visual scene as a graph whose nodes are objects (with attributes) and whose edges encode pairwise relationships such as "on top of", "inside", or "attached to". Scene graph generation from images is an established computer vision task, and 3D scene graphs extend the idea to hierarchical maps spanning objects, places, rooms, and buildings. Robots use scene graphs as symbolic scaffolding for task planning and spatial queries.

Why it matters for physical AI

Scene graphs bridge raw perception and symbolic reasoning, giving language model planners a queryable world state and enabling long-horizon tasks that pure pixel-to-action policies handle poorly.