# A Study of Failure Modes in Two-Stage Human-Object Interaction Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13448/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (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)
- [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)
- [Detecting Human-Object Interaction via Fabricated Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08214/) (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)
- [ViPLO: Vision Transformer based Pose-Conditioned Self-Loop Graph for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08114/) (2023)
- [Interactiveness Field in Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07718/) (2022)
- [Efficient Adaptive Human-Object Interaction Detection with Concept-guided Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03696/) (2023)
- [Relational Context Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04997/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Zero-Shot HOI Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03541/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Neural-Logic Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09817/) (2023)
- [Locality-Aware Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19503/) (2025)
- [HOLa: Zero-Shot HOI Detection with Low-Rank Decomposed VLM Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15542/) (2025)
- [CrossHOI-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for HOI Evaluation across Vision-Language Models and HOI-Specific Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18753/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction as Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18357/) (2025)
- [SHOE: Semantic HOI Open-Vocabulary Evaluation Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to detect interactions between humans and objects in images. While recent advances have improved performance on existing benchmarks, their evaluations mainly focus on overall prediction accuracy and provide limited insight into the underlying causes of model failures. In particular, modern models often struggle in complex scenes involving multiple people and rare interaction combinations. In this work, we present a study to better understand the failure modes of two-stage HOI models, which form the basis of many current HOI detection approaches. Rather than constructing a large-scale benchmark, we instead decompose HOI detection into multiple interpretable perspectives and analyze model behavior across these dimensions to study different types of failure patterns. We curate a subset of images from an existing HOI dataset organized by human-object-interaction configurations (e.g., multi-person interactions and object sharing), and analyze model behavior under these configurations to examine different failure modes. This design allows us to analyze how these HOI models behave under different scene compositions and why their predictions fail. Importantly, high overall benchmark performance does not necessarily reflect robust visual reasoning about human-object relationships. We hope that this study can provide useful insights into the limitations of HOI models and offer observations for future research in this area.