# Streamlined Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27500 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27500/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Learning to Detect Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05448/) (2017)
- [Visual Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04474/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DRG: Dual Relation Graph for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11714/) (2020)
- [Mining the Benefits of Two-stage and One-stage HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05077/) (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)
- [DINOv2 Meets Text: A Unified Framework for Image- and Pixel-Level Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16334/) (2024)
- [HOICLIP: Efficient Knowledge Transfer for HOI Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15786/) (2023)
- [Glance and Gaze: Inferring Action-aware Points for One-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05269/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Human-Object Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04262/) (2020)
- [Detecting Any Human-Object Interaction Relationship: Universal HOI Detector with Spatial Prompt Learning on Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03799/) (2023)
- [FGAHOI: Fine-Grained Anchors for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04019/) (2023)
- [Open-World Human-Object Interaction Detection via Multi-modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07221/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Chameleon: Style-Content Disentangled Framework for Cross-Domain Object Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01079/) (2026)
- [HEIR: Learning Human-Entity Interactions with Functional Roles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-vocabulary human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize and recognize all human-object interactions in an image, including those unseen during training. Existing approaches usually rely on the collaboration between a conventional HOI detector and a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to recognize unseen HOI categories. However, feature fusion in this paradigm is challenging due to significant gaps in cross-model representations. To address this issue, we introduce SL-HOI, a StreamLined open-vocabulary HOI detection framework based solely on the powerful DINOv3 model. Our design leverages the complementary strengths of DINOv3's components: its backbone for fine-grained localization and its text-aligned vision head for open-vocabulary interaction classification. Moreover, to facilitate smooth cross-attention between the interaction queries and the vision head's output, we propose first feeding both the interaction queries and the backbone image tokens into the vision head, effectively bridging their representation gaps. All DINOv3 parameters in our approach are frozen, with only a small number of learnable parameters added, allowing a fast adaptation to the HOI detection task. Extensive experiments show that SL-HOI achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the SWiG-HOI and HICO-DET benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our streamlined model architecture. Code is available at https://github.com/MPI-Lab/SL-HOI.
