# The Overlooked Classifier in Human-Object Interaction Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05676/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Visual Compositional Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12407/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction Detection using Interaction Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14023/) (2020)
- [Mining the Benefits of Two-stage and One-stage HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05077/) (2021)
- [Reformulating HOI Detection as Adaptive Set Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05983/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) recognition is challenging due to two factors: (1) significant imbalance across classes and (2) requiring multiple labels per image. This paper shows that these two challenges can be effectively addressed by improving the classifier with the backbone architecture untouched. Firstly, we encode the semantic correlation among classes into the classification head by initializing the weights with language embeddings of HOIs. As a result, the performance is boosted significantly, especially for the few-shot subset. Secondly, we propose a new loss named LSE-Sign to enhance multi-label learning on a long-tailed dataset. Our simple yet effective method enables detection-free HOI classification, outperforming the state-of-the-arts that require object detection and human pose by a clear margin. Moreover, we transfer the classification model to instance-level HOI detection by connecting it with an off-the-shelf object detector. We achieve state-of-the-art without additional fine-tuning.