Focusing on What to Decode and What to Train: SOV Decoding with Specific Target Guided DeNoising and Vision Language Advisor

Junwen Chen, Yingcheng Wang, Keiji Yanai; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 9398-9407

Recent transformer-based methods achieve notable gains in the Human-object Interaction Detection (HOID) task by leveraging the detection of DETR and the prior knowledge of Vision-Language Model (VLM). However these methods suffer from extended training times and complex optimization due to the entanglement of object detection and HOI recognition during the decoding process. Especially the query embeddings used to predict both labels and boxes suffer from ambiguous representations and the gap between the prediction of HOI labels and verb labels is not considered. To address these challenges we introduce SOV-STG-VLA with three key components: Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) decoding Specific Target Guided (STG) denoising and a Vision-Language Advisor (VLA). Our SOV decoders disentangle object detection and verb recognition with a novel interaction region representation. The STG denoising strategy learns label embeddings with ground-truth information to guide the training and inference. Our SOV-STG achieves a fast convergence speed and high accuracy and builds a foundation for the VLA to incorporate the prior knowledge of the VLM. We introduce a vision advisor decoder to fuse both the interaction region information and the VLM's vision knowledge and a Verb-HOI prediction bridge to promote interaction representation learning. Our VLA notably improves our SOV-STG and achieves SOTA performance with one-sixth of training epochs compared to recent SOTA. Code and models are available at https://github.com/cjw2021/SOV-STG-VLA.