# Detecting Human-Object Interactions via Functional Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [HOTR: End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13682/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Human Object Interaction Detection with HOI Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04503/) (2021)
- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interaction via Fabricated Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08214/) (2021)
- [HOICLIP: Efficient Knowledge Transfer for HOI Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15786/) (2023)
- [MSTR: Multi-Scale Transformer for End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14709/) (2022)
- [Detecting Any Human-Object Interaction Relationship: Universal HOI Detector with Spatial Prompt Learning on Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03799/) (2023)
- [Visual Relationship Detection Using Part-and-Sum Transformers with Composite Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02170/) (2021)
- [UnionDet: Union-Level Detector Towards Real-Time Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12664/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Zero-Shot HOI Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03541/) (2022)
- [FGAHOI: Fine-Grained Anchors for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04019/) (2023)
- [QAHOI: Query-Based Anchors for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08647/) (2021)
- [Open-World Human-Object Interaction Detection via Multi-modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07221/) (2024)
- [EZ-HOI: VLM Adaptation via Guided Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23904/) (2024)
- [Exploring Conditional Multi-Modal Prompts for Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02484/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Foundation Models for Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06194/) (2024)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Object-Guided Cross-Modal Calibrated Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00259/) (2022)
- [Boosting Human-Object Interaction Detection with Text-to-Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12252/) (2023)
- [Category Query Learning for Human-Object Interaction Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14005/) (2023)
- [From Isolated Islands to Pangea: Unifying Semantic Space for Human Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00553/) (2023)
- [MOST: Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers for object discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05387/) (2023)
- [Improving Human-Object Interaction Detection via Phrase Learning and Label Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07383/) (2021)
- [Discovering Human-Object Interaction Concepts via Self-Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14272/) (2022)
- [Re-mine, Learn and Reason: Exploring the Cross-modal Semantic Correlations for Language-guided HOI detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13529/) (2023)
- [HOLa: Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15542/) (2025)
- [ACP++: Action Co-occurrence Priors for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04047/) (2021)
- [Unseen No More: Unlocking the Potential of CLIP for Generative Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05974/) (2024)
- [Highlighting Object Category Immunity for the Generalization of Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09492/) (2022)
- [Chairs Can be Stood on: Overcoming Object Bias in Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02400/) (2022)
- [HODN: Disentangling Human-Object Feature for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10158/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an approach for detecting human-object interactions (HOIs) in images, based on the idea that humans interact with functionally similar objects in a similar manner. The proposed model is simple and efficiently uses the data, visual features of the human, relative spatial orientation of the human and the object, and the knowledge that functionally similar objects take part in similar interactions with humans. We provide extensive experimental validation for our approach and demonstrate state-of-the-art results for HOI detection. On the HICO-Det dataset our method achieves a gain of over 2.5% absolute points in mean average precision (mAP) over state-of-the-art. We also show that our approach leads to significant performance gains for zero-shot HOI detection in the seen object setting. We further demonstrate that using a generic object detector, our model can generalize to interactions involving previously unseen objects.