  We present an approach for detecting human-object interactions (HOIs) in
images, based on the idea that humans interact with functionally similar
objects in a similar manner. The proposed model is simple and efficiently uses
the data, visual features of the human, relative spatial orientation of the
human and the object, and the knowledge that functionally similar objects take
part in similar interactions with humans. We provide extensive experimental
validation for our approach and demonstrate state-of-the-art results for HOI
detection. On the HICO-Det dataset our method achieves a gain of over 2.5%
absolute points in mean average precision (mAP) over state-of-the-art. We also
show that our approach leads to significant performance gains for zero-shot HOI
detection in the seen object setting. We further demonstrate that using a
generic object detector, our model can generalize to interactions involving
previously unseen objects.
