# EZ-HOI: VLM Adaptation via Guided Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot HOI Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Unified Vision and Language Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07225/) (2022)
- [QPIC: Query-Based Pairwise Human-Object Interaction Detection with Image-Wide Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05399/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19294/) (2025)
- [HOLa: Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15542/) (2025)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [Modeling Thousands of Human Annotators for Generalizable Text-to-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09962/) (2025)
- [What if Agents Could Imagine? Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary HOI Comprehension through Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11499/) (2026)
- [Bidirectional Prototype-Reward co-Evolution for Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09394/) (2025)
- [CrossHOI-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for HOI Evaluation across Vision-Language Models and HOI-Specific Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18753/) (2025)
- [Top-Down Compression: Revisit Efficient Vision Token Projection for Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11945/) (2025)
- [RoHOI: Robustness Benchmark for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09111/) (2025)
- [Edge-Based Multimodal Sensor Data Fusion with Vision Language Models (VLMs) for Real-time Autonomous Vehicle Accident Avoidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01057/) (2025)
- [Visual Diversity and Region-aware Prompt Learning for Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25094/) (2025)
- [Streamlined Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27500/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Long-Tail Bias in HOI Detection via Adaptive Diversity Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18811/) (2025)
- [Zero-shot HOI Detection with MLLM-based Detector-agnostic Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15124/) (2026)
- [SHOE: Semantic HOI Open-Vocabulary Evaluation Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01586/) (2026)
- [Mining Instance-Centric Vision-Language Contexts for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02071/) (2026)
- [Actor as Its Own Critic: Unifying Region Understanding and Localization via CycleGRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11581/) (2026)
- [Unleashing Multimodal Large Language Models for Training-free HOI Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13881/) (2026)
- [Multi-Sequence Parotid Gland Lesion Segmentation via Expert Text-Guided Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09645/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Graph Network Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Detection with PDE Graph Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12554/) (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)
- [A Study of Failure Modes in Two-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13448/) (2026)
- [Towards Unconstrained Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14069/) (2026)
- [InterMesh: Explicit Interaction-Aware End-to-End Multi-Person Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04554/) (2026)
- [Token-Based Affordance Grounding with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03595/) (2026)
- [FineHOI: Part-Aware Dense Representations for Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05959/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting Human-Object Interactions (HOI) in zero-shot settings, where models must handle unseen classes, poses significant challenges. Existing methods that rely on aligning visual encoders with large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to tap into the extensive knowledge of VLMs, require large, computationally expensive models and encounter training difficulties. Adapting VLMs with prompt learning offers an alternative to direct alignment. However, fine-tuning on task-specific datasets often leads to overfitting to seen classes and suboptimal performance on unseen classes, due to the absence of unseen class labels. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel prompt learning-based framework for Efficient Zero-Shot HOI detection (EZ-HOI). First, we introduce Large Language Model (LLM) and VLM guidance for learnable prompts, integrating detailed HOI descriptions and visual semantics to adapt VLMs to HOI tasks. However, because training datasets contain seen-class labels alone, fine-tuning VLMs on such datasets tends to optimize learnable prompts for seen classes instead of unseen ones. Therefore, we design prompt learning for unseen classes using information from related seen classes, with LLMs utilized to highlight the differences between unseen and related seen classes. Quantitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our EZ-HOI achieves state-of-the-art performance across various zero-shot settings with only 10.35% to 33.95% of the trainable parameters compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ChelsieLei/EZ-HOI.