# Iwin: Human-Object Interaction Detection via Transformer with Irregular Windows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10537/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07333/) (2017)
- [Visual Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04474/) (2015)
- [HOTR: End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13682/) (2021)
- [Learning Human-Object Interactions by Graph Parsing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07962/) (2018)
- [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)
- [VSGNet: Spatial Attention Network for Detecting Human Object Interactions Using Graph Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05541/) (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)
- [Detailed 2D-3D Joint Representation for Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08154/) (2020)
- [Spatially Conditioned Graphs for Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06060/) (2020)
- [Pose-aware Multi-level Feature Network for Human Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08453/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Exploring Predicate Visual Context in Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06202/) (2023)
- [Efficient Adaptive Human-Object Interaction Detection with Concept-guided Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03696/) (2023)
- [Neural-Logic Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09817/) (2023)
- [Human-Object Interaction Detection Collaborated with Large Relation-driven Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20155/) (2024)
- [Nonverbal Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08133/) (2024)
- [Video-based Human-Object Interaction Detection from Tubelet Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01908/) (2022)
- [Locality-Aware Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19503/) (2025)
- [Agglomerative Transformer for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08370/) (2023)
- [Joint Gaze-Location and Gaze-Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13857/) (2023)
- [A Review of Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10641/) (2024)
- [ECEA: Extensible Co-Existing Attention for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08196/) (2023)
- [HiH: A Multi-modal Hierarchy in Hierarchy Network for Unconstrained Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11210/) (2023)
- [Towards Zero-shot Human-Object Interaction Detection via Vision-Language Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07246/) (2024)
- [MVBIND: Self-Supervised Music Recommendation For Videos Via Embedding Space Binding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09286/) (2024)
- [Quality-guided Skin Tone Enhancement for Portrait Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15848/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Scoring with Enhanced Semantics for Training-Free Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17456/) (2025)
- [Sharingan: A Transformer-based Architecture for Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00816/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot HOI Detection with MLLM-based Detector-agnostic Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15124/) (2026)
- [FineHOI: Part-Aware Dense Representations for Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05959/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a new vision Transformer, named Iwin Transformer, which is specifically designed for human-object interaction (HOI) detection, a detailed scene understanding task involving a sequential process of human/object detection and interaction recognition. Iwin Transformer is a hierarchical Transformer which progressively performs token representation learning and token agglomeration within irregular windows. The irregular windows, achieved by augmenting regular grid locations with learned offsets, 1) eliminate redundancy in token representation learning, which leads to efficient human/object detection, and 2) enable the agglomerated tokens to align with humans/objects with different shapes, which facilitates the acquisition of highly-abstracted visual semantics for interaction recognition. The effectiveness and efficiency of Iwin Transformer are verified on the two standard HOI detection benchmark datasets, HICO-DET and V-COCO. Results show our method outperforms existing Transformers-based methods by large margins (3.7 mAP gain on HICO-DET and 2.0 mAP gain on V-COCO) with fewer training epochs (0.5 ×).