# Learning Human-Object Interaction as Groups

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18357 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18357/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08770/) (2022)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Mining Instance-Centric Vision-Language Contexts for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02071/) (2026)
- [A Study of Failure Modes in Two-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13448/) (2026)
- [Efficient Human-Contact Representation for Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09388/) (2026)
- [Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering for Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22665/) (2026)
- [HEIR: Learning Human-Entity Interactions with Functional Roles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human-Object Interaction Detection (HOI-DET) aims to localize human-object pairs and identify their interactive relationships. To aggregate contextual cues, existing methods typically propagate information across all detected entities via self-attention mechanisms, or establish message passing between humans and objects with bipartite graphs. However, they primarily focus on pairwise relationships, overlooking that interactions in real-world scenarios often emerge from collective behaviors (multiple humans and objects engaging in joint activities). In light of this, we revisit relation modeling from a group view and propose GroupHOI, a framework that propagates contextual information in terms of geometric proximity and semantic similarity. To exploit the geometric proximity, humans and objects are grouped into distinct clusters using a learnable proximity estimator based on spatial features derived from bounding boxes. In each group, a soft correspondence is computed via self-attention to aggregate and dispatch contextual cues. To incorporate the semantic similarity, we enhance the vanilla transformer-based interaction decoder with local contextual cues from HO-pair features. Extensive experiments on HICO-DET and V-COCO benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of GroupHOI over the state-of-the-art methods. It also exhibits leading performance on the more challenging Nonverbal Interaction Detection (NVI-DET) task, which involves varied forms of higher-order interactions within groups.