# Exploring Structure-aware Transformer over Interaction Proposals for Human-Object Interaction Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.06291 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06291/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2022.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [Exploring Visual Relationship for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07041/) (2018)
- [Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07333/) (2017)
- [X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14080/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Graphical Contrastive Losses for Scene Graph Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02728/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Contextual Transformer Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12292/) (2021)
- [HOI Analysis: Integrating and Decomposing Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16219/) (2020)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interaction via Fabricated Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08214/) (2021)
- [Affordance Transfer Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02867/) (2021)
- [Glance and Gaze: Inferring Action-aware Points for One-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05269/) (2021)
- [Deep Contextual Attention for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07721/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Wave-ViT: Unifying Wavelet and Transformers for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04978/) (2022)
- [Exploring Predicate Visual Context in Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06202/) (2023)
- [RLIPv2: Fast Scaling of Relational Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09351/) (2023)
- [ViPLO: Vision Transformer based Pose-Conditioned Self-Loop Graph for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08114/) (2023)
- [Efficient Adaptive Human-Object Interaction Detection with Concept-guided Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03696/) (2023)
- [Relational Context Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04997/) (2023)
- [Exploring Conditional Multi-Modal Prompts for Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02484/) (2024)
- [Neural-Logic Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09817/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Potential of Large Foundation Models for Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06194/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Structural Similarity Between Images and Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17048/) (2023)
- [Human-centric Scene Understanding for 3D Large-scale Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14392/) (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)
- [Human-Object Interaction Prediction in Videos through Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03597/) (2023)
- [Locality-Aware Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19503/) (2025)
- [Diagnosing Human-object Interaction Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08529/) (2023)
- [HODN: Disentangling Human-Object Feature for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10158/) (2023)
- [Agglomerative Transformer for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08370/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection with Interaction-aware Prompt and Concept Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03207/) (2025)
- [CycleHOI: Improving Human-Object Interaction Detection with Cycle Consistency of Detection and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11433/) (2024)
- [A Review of Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10641/) (2024)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction as Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18357/) (2025)
- [Focusing on what to decode and what to train: SOV Decoding with Specific Target Guided DeNoising and Vision Language Advisor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02291/) (2023)
- [From Category to Scenery: An End-to-End Framework for Multi-Person Human-Object Interaction Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00917/) (2024)
- [Enhancing HOI Detection with Contextual Cues from Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16475/) (2023)
- [Geometric Visual Fusion Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Person Human-Object Interaction Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03440/) (2025)
- [Egocentric Human-Object Interaction Detection: A New Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14189/) (2025)
- [RoHOI: Robustness Benchmark for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09111/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent high-performing Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection techniques have been highly influenced by Transformer-based object detector (i.e., DETR). Nevertheless, most of them directly map parametric interaction queries into a set of HOI predictions through vanilla Transformer in a one-stage manner. This leaves rich inter- or intra-interaction structure under-exploited. In this work, we design a novel Transformer-style HOI detector, i.e., Structure-aware Transformer over Interaction Proposals (STIP), for HOI detection. Such design decomposes the process of HOI set prediction into two subsequent phases, i.e., an interaction proposal generation is first performed, and then followed by transforming the non-parametric interaction proposals into HOI predictions via a structure-aware Transformer. The structure-aware Transformer upgrades vanilla Transformer by encoding additionally the holistically semantic structure among interaction proposals as well as the locally spatial structure of human/object within each interaction proposal, so as to strengthen HOI predictions. Extensive experiments conducted on V-COCO and HICO-DET benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of STIP, and superior results are reported when comparing with the state-of-the-art HOI detectors. Source code is available at urlhttps://github.com/zyong812/STIP.