RefHCM: A Unified Model for Referring Perceptions in Human-Centric Scenarios

Human-centric perceptions play a crucial role in real-world applications. While recent human-centric works have achieved impressive progress, these efforts are often constrained to the visual domain and lack interaction with human instructions, limiting their applicability in broader scenarios such as chatbots and sports analysis. This paper introducesReferring Human Perceptions, where a referring prompt specifies the person of interest in an image. To tackle the new task, we propose RefHCM (ReferringHuman-CentricModel), a unified framework to integrate a wide range of human-centric referring tasks. Specifically, RefHCM employs sequence mergers to convert raw multimodal data—including images, text, coordinates, and parsing maps—into semantic tokens. This standardized representation enables RefHCM to reformulate diverse human-centric referring tasks into a sequence-to-sequence paradigm, solved using a plain encoder-decoder transformer architecture. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, RefHCM effectively facilitates knowledge transfer across tasks and exhibits unforeseen capabilities in handling complex reasoning. This work represents the first attempt to address referring human perceptions with a general-purpose framework, while simultaneously establishing a corresponding benchmark that sets new standards for the field. Extensive experiments showcase RefHCM's competitive and even superior performance across multiple human-centric referring tasks. The code and data are publicly athttps://github.com/JJJYmmm/RefHCM.