Zero-shot HOI Detection with MLLM-based Detector-agnostic Interaction Recognition

Zero-shot Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to locate humans and objects in images and recognize their interactions. While advances in openvocabulary object detection provide promising solutions for object localization, interaction recognition (IR) remains challenging due to the combinatorial diversity of interactions. Existing methods, including two-stage methods, tightly couple IR with a specific detector and rely on coarse-grained vision-language model (VLM) features, which limit generalization to unseen interactions. In this work, we propose a decoupled framework that separates object detection from IR and leverages multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for zero-shot IR. We introduce a deterministic generation method that formulates IR as a visual question answering task and enforces deterministic outputs, enabling training-free zeroshot IR. To further enhance performance and efficiency by fine-tuning the model, we design a spatial-aware pooling module that integrates appearance and pairwise spatial cues, and a one-pass deterministic matching method that predicts all candidate interactions in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on HICO-DET and V-COCO demonstrate that our method achieves superior zeroshot performance, strong cross-dataset generalization, and the flexibility to integrate with any object detectors without retraining. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SY-Xuan/DA-HOI .