# Generative Human-Object Interaction Detection via Differentiable Cognitive Steering of Multi-modal LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17640/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 50 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [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)
- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08827/) (2025)
- [QPIC: Query-Based Pairwise Human-Object Interaction Detection with Image-Wide Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05399/) (2021)
- [GEN-VLKT: Simplify Association and Enhance Interaction Understanding for HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13954/) (2022)
- [Mining the Benefits of Two-stage and One-stage HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05077/) (2021)
- [Efficient Two-Stage Detection of Human-Object Interactions with a Novel Unary-Pairwise Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01838/) (2021)
- [HOICLIP: Efficient Knowledge Transfer for HOI Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15786/) (2023)
- [Exploring Predicate Visual Context in Detecting Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06202/) (2023)
- [RLIP: Relational Language-Image Pre-training for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01814/) (2022)
- [ConsNet: Learning Consistency Graph for Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06254/) (2020)
- [RLIPv2: Fast Scaling of Relational Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09351/) (2023)
- [From Pixels to Graphs: Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00906/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Detecting Any Human-Object Interaction Relationship: Universal HOI Detector with Spatial Prompt Learning on Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03799/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Zero-Shot HOI Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03541/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and the interactions between them. Existing methods operate under a closed-world assumption, treating the task as a classification problem over a small, predefined verb set, which struggles to generalize to the long-tail of unseen or ambiguous interactions in the wild. While recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) possess the rich world knowledge required for open-vocabulary understanding, they remain decoupled from existing HOI detectors since fine-tuning them is computationally prohibitive. To address these constraints, we propose GRASP-HO, a novel Generative Reasoning And Steerable Perception framework that reformulates HOI detection from the closed-set classification task to the open-vocabulary generation problem. To bridge the vision and cognitive, we first extract hybrid interaction representations, then design a lightweight learnable cognitive steering conduit (CSC) module to inject the fine-grained visual evidence into a frozen MLLM for effective reasoning. To address the supervision mismatch between classification-based HOI datasets and open-vocabulary generative models, we introduce a hybrid guidance strategy that coupling the language modeling loss and auxiliary classification loss, enabling discriminative grounding without sacrificing generative flexibility. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art closed-set performance and strong zero-shot generalization, achieving a unified paradigm that seamlessly bridges discriminative perception and generative reasoning for open-world HOI detection.