Prompt-Guided Relational Reasoning for Social Behavior Understanding with Vision Foundation Models

Abstract: Group Activity Detection (GAD) involves recognizing social groups and their collective behaviors in videos. Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), like DinoV2, offer excellent features, but are pretrained primarily on object-centric data and remain underexplored for modeling group dynamics. While they are a promising alternative to highly task-specific GAD architectures that require full fine-tuning, our initial investigation reveals that simply swapping CNN backbones used in these methods with VFMs brings little gain, underscoring the need for structured, group-aware reasoning on top. We introduce Prompt-driven Group Activity Detection (ProGraD) -- a method that bridges this gap through 1) learnable group prompts to guide the VFM attention toward social configurations, and 2) a lightweight two-layer GroupContext Transformer that infers actor-group associations and collective behavior. We evaluate our approach on two recent GAD benchmarks: Cafe, which features multiple concurrent social groups, and Social-CAD, which focuses on single-group interactions. While we surpass state-of-the-art in both settings, our method is especially effective in complex multi-group scenarios, where we yield a gain of 6.5\% (Group mAP\@1.0) and 8.2\% (Group mAP\@0.5) using only 10M trainable parameters. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that ProGraD produces interpretable attention maps, offering insights into actor-group reasoning. Code and models will be released.