# Category Query Learning for Human-Object Interaction Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14005 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14005/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Query2Label: A Simple Transformer Way to Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10834/) (2021)
- [iCAN: Instance-Centric Attention Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10437/) (2018)
- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Spatially Conditioned Graphs for Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06060/) (2020)
- [Efficient Two-Stage Detection of Human-Object Interactions with a Novel Unary-Pairwise Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01838/) (2021)
- [Pose-aware Multi-level Feature Network for Human Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08453/) (2019)
- [HOI Analysis: Integrating and Decomposing Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16219/) (2020)
- [PaStaNet: Toward Human Activity Knowledge Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00945/) (2020)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Action Co-occurrence Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08728/) (2020)
- [Glance and Gaze: Inferring Action-aware Points for One-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05269/) (2021)
- [RLIP: Relational Language-Image Pre-training for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01814/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Detecting Any Human-Object Interaction Relationship: Universal HOI Detector with Spatial Prompt Learning on Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03799/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Human-Object Interaction Detection Collaborated with Large Relation-driven Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20155/) (2024)
- [HOLa: Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15542/) (2025)
- [Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection with Interaction-aware Prompt and Concept Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03207/) (2025)
- [Exploring Self- and Cross-Triplet Correlations for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05676/) (2024)
- [Toward Multi-class Anomaly Detection: Exploring Class-aware Unified Model against Inter-class Interference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14213/) (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)
- [VHOI: Controllable Video Generation of Human-Object Interactions from Sparse Trajectories via Motion Densification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09646/) (2025)
- [Enhancing HOI Detection with Contextual Cues from Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16475/) (2023)
- [Geometric Features Enhanced Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18691/) (2024)
- [Orchestrating the Symphony of Prompt Distribution Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08506/) (2024)
- [CQ-DINO: Mitigating Gradient Dilution via Category Queries for Vast Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18430/) (2025)
- [DQEN: Dual Query Enhancement Network for DETR-based HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18896/) (2025)
- [B-RIGHT: Benchmark Re-evaluation for Integrity in Generalized Human-Object Interaction Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16724/) (2025)
- [On the Robustness of Human-Object Interaction Detection against Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18021/) (2025)
- [Contextualized Representation Learning for Effective Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12784/) (2025)
- [Generative Human-Object Interaction Detection via Differentiable Cognitive Steering of Multi-modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17640/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unlike most previous HOI methods that focus on learning better human-object features, we propose a novel and complementary approach called category query learning. Such queries are explicitly associated to interaction categories, converted to image specific category representation via a transformer decoder, and learnt via an auxiliary image-level classification task. This idea is motivated by an earlier multi-label image classification method, but is for the first time applied for the challenging human-object interaction classification task. Our method is simple, general and effective. It is validated on three representative HOI baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art results on two benchmarks.