A universal HOI detector is a computer vision framework designed to localize and classify human-object interactions across open-world and open-vocabulary scenarios rather than a fixed set of predefined categories. While standard human-object interaction detection is restricted to recognizing specific, pre-annotated triplets of humans, verbs, and objects, a universal detector generalizes to arbitrary interactions by leveraging pre-trained vision-language foundation models and semantic prompts. It aligns visual representations of human and object pairs with rich linguistic descriptions, enabling the recognition of complex, zero-shot, or previously unseen relational behaviors across diverse real-world scenes.