# Exploring Predicate Visual Context in Detecting Human-Object Interactions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DETRs with Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13080/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Instance-aware Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07709/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Knowledge Composition using Task Vectors with Learned Anisotropic Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02880/) (2024)
- [HUMOTO: A 4D Dataset of Mocap Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10414/) (2025)
- [Open-World Human-Object Interaction Detection via Multi-modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07221/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Reconstructing In-the-Wild Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15898/) (2025)
- [LOME: Learning Human-Object Manipulation with Action-Conditioned Egocentric World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27449/) (2026)
- [HOLa: Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15542/) (2025)
- [Unseen No More: Unlocking the Potential of CLIP for Generative Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05974/) (2024)
- [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)
- [An Image-like Diffusion Method for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18134/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction as Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18357/) (2025)
- [Temporally Grounding Instructional Diagrams in Unconstrained Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12066/) (2024)
- [PhysLab: A Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Granularity Visual Parsing of Physics Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06631/) (2025)
- [Enhancing HOI Detection with Contextual Cues from Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16475/) (2023)
- [SGC-Net: Stratified Granular Comparison Network for Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00414/) (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)
- [No More Sibling Rivalry: Debiasing Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00760/) (2025)
- [Visual Diversity and Region-aware Prompt Learning for Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25094/) (2025)
- [Towards Flexible Visual Relationship Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08305/) (2024)
- [Orchestrating the Symphony of Prompt Distribution Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08506/) (2024)
- [CL-HOI: Cross-Level Human-Object Interaction Distillation from Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15657/) (2024)
- [VLM-HOI: Vision Language Models for Interpretable Human-Object Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18038/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Scene Understanding from Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11653/) (2025)
- [Reference-free Human-Object Interaction Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09130/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, the DETR framework has emerged as the dominant approach for human--object interaction (HOI) research. In particular, two-stage transformer-based HOI detectors are amongst the most performant and training-efficient approaches. However, these often condition HOI classification on object features that lack fine-grained contextual information, eschewing pose and orientation information in favour of visual cues about object identity and box extremities. This naturally hinders the recognition of complex or ambiguous interactions. In this work, we study these issues through visualisations and carefully designed experiments. Accordingly, we investigate how best to re-introduce image features via cross-attention. With an improved query design, extensive exploration of keys and values, and box pair positional embeddings as spatial guidance, our model with enhanced predicate visual context (PViC) outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the HICO-DET and V-COCO benchmarks, while maintaining low training cost.