Visual-Semantic Graph Attention Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection

In scene understanding, machines benefit from not only detecting individual scene instances but also from learning their possible interactions. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection tries to infer the predicate on atriplet. Contextual information has been found critical in inferring interactions. However, most works use features from single object instances that have a direct relation with the subject. Few works have studied the disambiguating contribution of subsidiary relations in addition to how attention might leverage them for inference. We contribute a dual-graph attention network that aggregates contextual visual, spatial, and semantic information dynamically for primary subject-object relations as well as subsidiary relations. Graph attention networks dynamically leverage node neighborhood information. Our network uses attention to first leverage visual-spatial and semantic cues from primary and subsidiary relations independently and then combines them before a final readout step. Our network learns to use primary and subsidiary relations to improve inference: encouraging the right interpretations and discouraging incorrect ones. We call our model: Visual-Semantic Graph Attention Networks (VS-GATs). We surpass state-of-the-art HOI detection mAPs in the challenging HICO-DET dataset, including in long-tail cases that are harder to interpret. Code, video, and supplementary information is available at http://www.juanrojas.net/VSGAT.