# Is Object Detection Necessary for Human-Object Interaction Recognition?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13083/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06640/) (2017)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Unbiased Scene Graph Generation from Biased Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11949/) (2020)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06369/) (2017)
- [Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07333/) (2017)
- [HOTR: End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13682/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-Embedded Routing Network for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03326/) (2019)
- [QPIC: Query-Based Pairwise Human-Object Interaction Detection with Image-Wide Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05399/) (2021)
- [PPDM: Parallel Point Detection and Matching for Real-time Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12898/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Human Object Interaction Detection with HOI Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04503/) (2021)
- [iCAN: Instance-Centric Attention Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10437/) (2018)
- [DRG: Dual Relation Graph for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11714/) (2020)
- [Reformulating HOI Detection as Adaptive Set Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05983/) (2021)
- [Spatially Conditioned Graphs for Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06060/) (2020)
- [PaStaNet: Toward Human Activity Knowledge Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00945/) (2020)
- [Factorizable Net: An Efficient Subgraph-based Framework for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11538/) (2018)
- [Glance and Gaze: Inferring Action-aware Points for One-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05269/) (2021)
- [Attentional Pooling for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01467/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [Text-Only Training for Image Captioning using Noise-Injected CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00575/) (2022)
- [RelViT: Concept-guided Vision Transformer for Visual Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11167/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper revisits human-object interaction (HOI) recognition at image level without using supervisions of object location and human pose. We name it detection-free HOI recognition, in contrast to the existing detection-supervised approaches which rely on object and keypoint detections to achieve state of the art. With our method, not only the detection supervision is evitable, but superior performance can be achieved by properly using image-text pre-training (such as CLIP) and the proposed Log-Sum-Exp Sign (LSE-Sign) loss function. Specifically, using text embeddings of class labels to initialize the linear classifier is essential for leveraging the CLIP pre-trained image encoder. In addition, LSE-Sign loss facilitates learning from multiple labels on an imbalanced dataset by normalizing gradients over all classes in a softmax format. Surprisingly, our detection-free solution achieves 60.5 mAP on the HICO dataset, outperforming the detection-supervised state of the art by 13.4 mAP