Daily Papers

When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to all visual tokens at each generation step, leading to diluted focus and unnecessary computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Gaze Attention, a novel mechanism that enables MLLMs to selectively attend to task-relevant visual regions during generation. Specifically, we spatially group visual embeddings-stored as key-value caches-into compact gaze regions, each represented by a lightweight descriptor. At each decoding step, the model dynamically selects the most relevant regions and restricts attention to them, reducing redundant computation while enhancing focus. To mitigate the loss of global context caused by localized attention, we further propose learnable context tokens appended to each image or frame, allowing the model to maintain holistic visual awareness. Extensive experiments on image and video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that Gaze Attention matches or surpasses dense-attention baselines, while using up to 90% fewer visual KV entries in the attention computation.

Eye gaze, encompassing fixations and saccades, provides critical insights into human intentions and future actions. This study introduces a gaze-regularized framework that enhances Vision Language Models (VLMs) for egocentric behavior understanding. Unlike existing methods that rely solely on visual data and overlook gaze information, our approach directly incorporates gaze information into the VLM architecture during training. By generating gaze-based queries, the model dynamically focuses on gaze-highlighted regions, while a gaze-regularization mechanism ensures the alignment of model attention with human attention patterns. To better understand how gaze can be effectively integrated into VLMs, we conducted extensive experiments exploring various strategies for incorporating gaze data. These innovations enable the prediction of future events with detailed action descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate a nearly 13 % improvement in semantic scores compared to baseline models not leveraging gaze data, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. This work establishes a foundation for leveraging the human gaze in VLMs, significantly boosting their predictive capabilities in applications requiring accurate and robust future event prediction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing into Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), capable of processing image, audio, and video as well as text. Combining first-person video, MLLMs show promising potential for understanding human activities through video and audio, enabling many human-computer interaction and human-augmentation applications such as human activity support, real-world agents, and skill transfer to robots or other individuals. However, handling high-resolution, long-duration videos generates large latent representations, leading to substantial memory and processing demands, limiting the length and resolution MLLMs can manage. Reducing video resolution can lower memory usage but often compromises comprehension. This paper introduces a method that optimizes first-person video analysis by integrating eye-tracking data, and proposes a method that decomposes first-person vision video into sub areas for regions of gaze focus. By processing these selectively gazed-focused inputs, our approach achieves task comprehension equivalent to or even better than processing the entire image at full resolution, but with significantly reduced video data input (reduce the number of pixels to one-tenth), offering an efficient solution for using MLLMs to interpret and utilize human skills.

Estimation eye gaze direction is useful in various human-computer interaction tasks. Knowledge of gaze direction can give valuable information regarding users point of attention. Certain patterns of eye movements known as eye accessing cues are reported to be related to the cognitive processes in the human brain. We propose a real-time framework for the classification of eye gaze direction and estimation of eye accessing cues. In the first stage, the algorithm detects faces using a modified version of the Viola-Jones algorithm. A rough eye region is obtained using geometric relations and facial landmarks. The eye region obtained is used in the subsequent stage to classify the eye gaze direction. A convolutional neural network is employed in this work for the classification of eye gaze direction. The proposed algorithm was tested on Eye Chimera database and found to outperform state of the art methods. The computational complexity of the algorithm is very less in the testing phase. The algorithm achieved an average frame rate of 24 fps in the desktop environment.

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

We present GazeGen, a user interaction system that generates visual content (images and videos) for locations indicated by the user's eye gaze. GazeGen allows intuitive manipulation of visual content by targeting regions of interest with gaze. Using advanced techniques in object detection and generative AI, GazeGen performs gaze-controlled image adding/deleting, repositioning, and surface material changes of image objects, and converts static images into videos. Central to GazeGen is the DFT Gaze (Distilled and Fine-Tuned Gaze) agent, an ultra-lightweight model with only 281K parameters, performing accurate real-time gaze predictions tailored to individual users' eyes on small edge devices. GazeGen is the first system to combine visual content generation with real-time gaze estimation, made possible exclusively by DFT Gaze. This real-time gaze estimation enables various visual content generation tasks, all controlled by the user's gaze. The input for DFT Gaze is the user's eye images, while the inputs for visual content generation are the user's view and the predicted gaze point from DFT Gaze. To achieve efficient gaze predictions, we derive the small model from a large model (10x larger) via novel knowledge distillation and personal adaptation techniques. We integrate knowledge distillation with a masked autoencoder, developing a compact yet powerful gaze estimation model. This model is further fine-tuned with Adapters, enabling highly accurate and personalized gaze predictions with minimal user input. DFT Gaze ensures low-latency and precise gaze tracking, supporting a wide range of gaze-driven tasks. We validate the performance of DFT Gaze on AEA and OpenEDS2020 benchmarks, demonstrating low angular gaze error and low latency on the edge device (Raspberry Pi 4). Furthermore, we describe applications of GazeGen, illustrating its versatility and effectiveness in various usage scenarios.

Human gaze offers rich supervisory signals for understanding visual attention in complex visual environments. In this paper, we propose Eyes on Target, a novel depth-aware and gaze-guided object detection framework designed for egocentric videos. Our approach injects gaze-derived features into the attention mechanism of a Vision Transformer (ViT), effectively biasing spatial feature selection toward human-attended regions. Unlike traditional object detectors that treat all regions equally, our method emphasises viewer-prioritised areas to enhance object detection. We validate our method on an egocentric simulator dataset where human visual attention is critical for task assessment, illustrating its potential in evaluating human performance in simulation scenarios. We evaluate the effectiveness of our gaze-integrated model through extensive experiments and ablation studies, demonstrating consistent gains in detection accuracy over gaze-agnostic baselines on both the custom simulator dataset and public benchmarks, including Ego4D Ego-Motion and Ego-CH-Gaze datasets. To interpret model behaviour, we also introduce a gaze-aware attention head importance metric, revealing how gaze cues modulate transformer attention dynamics.

People continuously perceive and interact with their surroundings based on underlying intentions that drive their exploration and behaviors. While research in egocentric user and scene understanding has focused primarily on motion and contact-based interaction, forecasting human visual perception itself remains less explored despite its fundamental role in guiding human actions and its implications for AR/VR and assistive technologies. We address the challenge of egocentric 3D visual span forecasting, predicting where a person's visual perception will focus next within their three-dimensional environment. To this end, we propose EgoSpanLift, a novel method that transforms egocentric visual span forecasting from 2D image planes to 3D scenes. EgoSpanLift converts SLAM-derived keypoints into gaze-compatible geometry and extracts volumetric visual span regions. We further combine EgoSpanLift with 3D U-Net and unidirectional transformers, enabling spatio-temporal fusion to efficiently predict future visual span in the 3D grid. In addition, we curate a comprehensive benchmark from raw egocentric multisensory data, creating a testbed with 364.6K samples for 3D visual span forecasting. Our approach outperforms competitive baselines for egocentric 2D gaze anticipation and 3D localization while achieving comparable results even when projected back onto 2D image planes without additional 2D-specific training.

Vision language models (VLMs) often generate hallucination, i.e., content that cannot be substantiated by either textual or visual inputs. Prior work primarily attributes this to over-reliance on linguistic prior knowledge rather than visual inputs. Some methods attempt to mitigate hallucination by amplifying visual token attention proportionally to their attention scores. However, these methods overlook the visual attention sink problem, where attention is frequently misallocated to task-irrelevant visual regions, and neglect cross-modal fusion balance by enhancing only visual attention without adjusting attention to the user query. This can result in amplifying incorrect areas while failing to properly interpret the user query. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective method called Gaze Shift-Guided Cross-modal Fusion Enhancement (GIFT). GIFT pre-computes a holistic visual saliency map by tracking positive changes in visual attention, or "gaze shifts", during user query comprehension, and leverages this map to amplify attention to both salient visual information and the user query at each decoding step. This reduces the impact of visual attention sink, as irrelevant tokens exhibit minimal shifts, while ensuring balanced cross-modal fusion for well-integrated representation. Extensive experiments show that GIFT effectively mitigates hallucination in VLMs across both generative and classification tasks, achieving up to 20.7% improvement over greedy decoding, while maintaining general vision-language performance with low computational overhead.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model's capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-adaptive RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong potential for robot learning by following language instructions. However, in practice, language alone is often insufficient to precisely convey human intent. It is difficult to describe which exact object to interact with among similar candidates, where to act on the object, or how the target may change during execution. To address this limitation, we propose Gaze2Act, a novel VLA framework that leverages human gaze as a dynamic and intuitive intent signal for complex interactive manipulation. Gaze2Act first bridges the ego-exo view gap by mapping first-person gaze into the robot's perspective through cross-view semantic matching, producing both an object mask and a gaze point for coarse-to-fine target specification. These cues are then integrated into the policy through perception-level prompting and action-level conditioning, allowing the robot to attend to relevant regions and execute precise interactions under dynamic intent. In a systematic evaluation across seven task categories and 16 real-robot tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, Gaze2Act achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intent accuracy and task success rate. It notably outperforms baselines in object disambiguation, fine-grained interaction, and dynamic intent steering. These results demonstrate that human gaze provides a natural, low-burden, and highly expressive modality for human-in-the-loop VLA control.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) must balance local detail against scene context when interpreting ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) imagery within a limited visual-input budget. Existing selection-based methods either prune tokens and select patches through relevance scoring, or crop actively through repeated inspection. Neither strategy directly redistributes pixels within a continuous full-scene view: the first retains selected tokens or patches, and the second re-encodes a crop detached from its surroundings. Our pilot study finds that a frozen MLLM already produces useful question-guided spatial requests, yet crop-based inspection of the selected regions does not consistently improve its answers. We therefore formulate UHR understanding as a question of where to spend a fixed pixel budget. Based on this, we introduce GazeEarth, a simple-yet-effective training-free framework that couples question-guided region selection with full-scene foveated observation. The MLLM selects evidence cells from an indexed overview; a deterministic, topology-preserving warp resamples the original image onto a fixed-size canvas, enlarging their shared neighborhood while compressing the periphery; the same frozen model answers from this focused view, using at most two MLLM calls and no external selector or iterative search. Across three UHR remote sensing benchmarks and four frozen backbones, GazeEarth improves benchmark-averaged accuracy by 4.6 to 9.4 percentage points over direct answering and 3.4 to 4.3 over overview answering, outperforming task-trained methods. Our analyses show that existing MLLMs can guide where to look in UHR images on their own, and that what they can infer from the selected evidence depends on how that evidence is presented.

Creating high-quality and realistic images is now possible thanks to the impressive advancements in image generation. A description in natural language of your desired output is all you need to obtain breathtaking results. However, as the use of generative models grows, so do concerns about the propagation of malicious content and misinformation. Consequently, the research community is actively working on the development of novel fake detection techniques, primarily focusing on low-level features and possible fingerprints left by generative models during the image generation process. In a different vein, in our work, we leverage human semantic knowledge to investigate the possibility of being included in frameworks of fake image detection. To achieve this, we collect a novel dataset of partially manipulated images using diffusion models and conduct an eye-tracking experiment to record the eye movements of different observers while viewing real and fake stimuli. A preliminary statistical analysis is conducted to explore the distinctive patterns in how humans perceive genuine and altered images. Statistical findings reveal that, when perceiving counterfeit samples, humans tend to focus on more confined regions of the image, in contrast to the more dispersed observational pattern observed when viewing genuine images. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/unveiling-the-truth.

Eye gaze is an important non-verbal cue for human affect analysis. Recent gaze estimation work indicated that information from the full face region can benefit performance. Pushing this idea further, we propose an appearance-based method that, in contrast to a long-standing line of work in computer vision, only takes the full face image as input. Our method encodes the face image using a convolutional neural network with spatial weights applied on the feature maps to flexibly suppress or enhance information in different facial regions. Through extensive evaluation, we show that our full-face method significantly outperforms the state of the art for both 2D and 3D gaze estimation, achieving improvements of up to 14.3% on MPIIGaze and 27.7% on EYEDIAP for person-independent 3D gaze estimation. We further show that this improvement is consistent across different illumination conditions and gaze directions and particularly pronounced for the most challenging extreme head poses.

We present GazeOnce360, a novel end-to-end model for multi-person gaze estimation from a single tabletop-mounted upward-facing fisheye camera. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on forward-facing cameras in constrained viewpoints, we address the underexplored setting of estimating the 3D gaze direction of multiple people distributed across a 360° scene from an upward fisheye perspective. To support research in this setting, we introduce MPSGaze360, a large-scale synthetic dataset rendered using Unreal Engine, featuring diverse multi-person configurations with accurate 3D gaze and eye landmark annotations. Our model tackles the severe distortion and perspective variation inherent in fisheye imagery by incorporating rotational convolutions and eye landmark supervision. To better capture fine-grained eye features crucial for gaze estimation, we propose a dual-resolution architecture that fuses global low-resolution context with high-resolution local eye regions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in our model. This work highlights the feasibility and potential of fisheye-based 360° gaze estimation in practical multi-person scenarios. Project page: https://caizhuojiang.github.io/GazeOnce360/.

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretraining framework for chest X-rays. We first propose a context-infused vision encoder that models how radiologists integrate clinical context -- including patient history, symptoms, and diagnostic intent -- to guide diagnostic reasoning. We then present a multi-level supervision paradigm that (1) enforces intra- and inter-modal semantic alignment through hybrid-positive contrastive learning, (2) injects diagnostic priors via disease-aware cross-modal representation learning, and (3) leverages radiologists' gaze as probabilistic priors to guide attention toward diagnostically salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGaze consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks, achieving up to +2.0% CheXbertF1 and +1.2% BLEU2 for free-text and structured report generation, +23.2% AUROC for zero-shot classification, and +12.2% Precision@1 for image-text retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-runner/CoGaze.

Following the gaze of other people and analyzing the target they are looking at can help us understand what they are thinking, and doing, and predict the actions that may follow. Existing methods for gaze following struggle to perform well in natural scenes with diverse objects, and focus on gaze points rather than objects, making it difficult to deliver clear semantics and accurate scope of the targets. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel gaze target prediction solution named GazeSeg, that can fully utilize the spatial visual field of the person as guiding information and lead to a progressively coarse-to-fine gaze target segmentation and recognition process. Specifically, a prompt-based visual foundation model serves as the encoder, working in conjunction with three distinct decoding modules (e.g. FoV perception, heatmap generation, and segmentation) to form the framework for gaze target prediction. Then, with the head bounding box performed as an initial prompt, GazeSeg obtains the FoV map, heatmap, and segmentation map progressively, leading to a unified framework for multiple tasks (e.g. direction estimation, gaze target segmentation, and recognition). In particular, to facilitate this research, we construct and release a new dataset, comprising 72k images with pixel-level annotations and 270 categories of gaze targets, built upon the GazeFollow dataset. The quantitative evaluation shows that our approach achieves the Dice of 0.325 in gaze target segmentation and 71.7% top-5 recognition. Meanwhile, our approach also outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.953 in AUC on the gaze-following task. The dataset and code will be released.

While exploring visual scenes, humans' scanpaths are driven by their underlying attention processes. Understanding visual scanpaths is essential for various applications. Traditional scanpath models predict the where and when of gaze shifts without providing explanations, creating a gap in understanding the rationale behind fixations. To bridge this gap, we introduce GazeXplain, a novel study of visual scanpath prediction and explanation. This involves annotating natural-language explanations for fixations across eye-tracking datasets and proposing a general model with an attention-language decoder that jointly predicts scanpaths and generates explanations. It integrates a unique semantic alignment mechanism to enhance the consistency between fixations and explanations, alongside a cross-dataset co-training approach for generalization. These novelties present a comprehensive and adaptable solution for explainable human visual scanpath prediction. Extensive experiments on diverse eye-tracking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GazeXplain in both scanpath prediction and explanation, offering valuable insights into human visual attention and cognitive processes.

In real-world scene perception human observers generate sequences of fixations to move image patches into the high-acuity center of the visual field. Models of visual attention developed over the last 25 years aim to predict two-dimensional probabilities of gaze positions for a given image via saliency maps. Recently, progress has been made on models for the generation of scan paths under the constraints of saliency as well as attentional and oculomotor restrictions. Experimental research demonstrated that task constraints can have a strong impact on viewing behavior. Here we propose a scan path model for both fixation positions and fixation durations, which includes influences of task instructions and interindividual differences. Based on an eye-movement experiment with four different task conditions, we estimated model parameters for each individual observer and task condition using a fully Bayesian dynamical modeling framework using a joint spatial-temporal likelihood approach with sequential estimation. Resulting parameter values demonstrate that model properties such as the attentional span are adjusted to task requirements. Posterior predictive checks indicate that our dynamical model can reproduce task differences in scan path statistics across individual observers.

Surgical phase recognition has gained significant attention due to its potential to offer solutions to numerous demands of the modern operating room. However, most existing methods concentrate on minimally invasive surgery (MIS), leaving surgical phase recognition for open surgery understudied. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the scarcity of publicly available open surgery video datasets for surgical phase recognition. To address this issue, we introduce a new egocentric open surgery video dataset for phase recognition, named EgoSurgery-Phase. This dataset comprises 15 hours of real open surgery videos spanning 9 distinct surgical phases all captured using an egocentric camera attached to the surgeon's head. In addition to video, the EgoSurgery-Phase offers eye gaze. As far as we know, it is the first real open surgery video dataset for surgical phase recognition publicly available. Furthermore, inspired by the notable success of masked autoencoders (MAEs) in video understanding tasks (e.g., action recognition), we propose a gaze-guided masked autoencoder (GGMAE). Considering the regions where surgeons' gaze focuses are often critical for surgical phase recognition (e.g., surgical field), in our GGMAE, the gaze information acts as an empirical semantic richness prior to guiding the masking process, promoting better attention to semantically rich spatial regions. GGMAE significantly improves the previous state-of-the-art recognition method (6.4% in Jaccard) and the masked autoencoder-based method (3.1% in Jaccard) on EgoSurgery-Phase. The dataset is released at https://github.com/Fujiry0/EgoSurgery.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

Vision-specific concepts such as "region" have played a key role in extending general machine learning frameworks to tasks like object detection. Given the success of region-based detectors for supervised learning and the progress of intra-image methods for contrastive learning, we explore the use of regions for reconstructive pre-training. Starting from Masked Autoencoding (MAE) both as a baseline and an inspiration, we propose a parallel pre-text task tailored to address the one-to-many mapping between images and regions. Since such regions can be generated in an unsupervised way, our approach (R-MAE) inherits the wide applicability from MAE, while being more "region-aware". We conduct thorough analyses during the development of R-MAE, and converge on a variant that is both effective and efficient (1.3% overhead over MAE). Moreover, it shows consistent quantitative improvements when generalized to various pre-training data and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks. Finally, we provide extensive qualitative visualizations to enhance the understanding of R-MAE's behaviour and potential. Code will be made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

Numerous models have been developed for scanpath and saliency prediction, which are typically trained on scanpaths, which model eye movement as a sequence of discrete fixation points connected by saccades, while the rich information contained in the raw trajectories is often discarded. Moreover, most existing approaches fail to capture the variability observed among human subjects viewing the same image. They generally predict a single scanpath of fixed, pre-defined length, which conflicts with the inherent diversity and stochastic nature of real-world visual attention. To address these challenges, we propose DiffEye, a diffusion-based training framework designed to model continuous and diverse eye movement trajectories during free viewing of natural images. Our method builds on a diffusion model conditioned on visual stimuli and introduces a novel component, namely Corresponding Positional Embedding (CPE), which aligns spatial gaze information with the patch-based semantic features of the visual input. By leveraging raw eye-tracking trajectories rather than relying on scanpaths, DiffEye captures the inherent variability in human gaze behavior and generates high-quality, realistic eye movement patterns, despite being trained on a comparatively small dataset. The generated trajectories can also be converted into scanpaths and saliency maps, resulting in outputs that more accurately reflect the distribution of human visual attention. DiffEye is the first method to tackle this task on natural images using a diffusion model while fully leveraging the richness of raw eye-tracking data. Our extensive evaluation shows that DiffEye not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in scanpath generation but also enables, for the first time, the generation of continuous eye movement trajectories. Project webpage: https://diff-eye.github.io/

Gaze target detection aims to predict the image location where the person is looking and the probability that a gaze is out of the scene. Several works have tackled this task by regressing a gaze heatmap centered on the gaze location, however, they overlooked decoding the relationship between the people and the gazed objects. This paper proposes a Transformer-based architecture that automatically detects objects (including heads) in the scene to build associations between every head and the gazed-head/object, resulting in a comprehensive, explainable gaze analysis composed of: gaze target area, gaze pixel point, the class and the image location of the gazed-object. Upon evaluation of the in-the-wild benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics (up to 2.91% gain in AUC, 50% reduction in gaze distance, and 9% gain in out-of-frame average precision) for gaze target detection and 11-13% improvement in average precision for the classification and the localization of the gazed-objects. The code of the proposed method is available https://github.com/francescotonini/object-aware-gaze-target-detection

Scanpath similarity metrics are central to eye-movement research, yet existing methods predominantly evaluate spatial and temporal alignment while neglecting semantic equivalence between attended image regions. We present a semantic scanpath similarity framework that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) into eye-tracking analysis. Each fixation is encoded under controlled visual context (patch-based and marker-based strategies) and transformed into concise textual descriptions, which are aggregated into scanpath-level representations. Semantic similarity is then computed using embedding-based and lexical NLP metrics and compared against established spatial measures, including MultiMatch and DTW. Experiments on free-viewing eye-tracking data demonstrate that semantic similarity captures partially independent variance from geometric alignment, revealing cases of high content agreement despite spatial divergence. We further analyze the impact of contextual encoding on description fidelity and metric stability. Our findings suggest that multimodal foundation models enable interpretable, content-aware extensions of classical scanpath analysis, providing a complementary dimension for gaze research within the ETRA community.

One of the most fundamental and information-laden actions humans do is to look at objects. However, a survey of current works reveals that existing gaze-related datasets annotate only the pixel being looked at, and not the boundaries of a specific object of interest. This lack of object annotation presents an opportunity for further advancing gaze estimation research. To this end, we present a challenging new task called gaze object prediction, where the goal is to predict a bounding box for a person's gazed-at object. To train and evaluate gaze networks on this task, we present the Gaze On Objects (GOO) dataset. GOO is composed of a large set of synthetic images (GOO Synth) supplemented by a smaller subset of real images (GOO-Real) of people looking at objects in a retail environment. Our work establishes extensive baselines on GOO by re-implementing and evaluating selected state-of-the art models on the task of gaze following and domain adaptation. Code is available on github.

Humans do not passively observe the visual world -- we actively look in order to act. Motivated by this principle, we introduce EyeRobot, a robotic system with gaze behavior that emerges from the need to complete real-world tasks. We develop a mechanical eyeball that can freely rotate to observe its surroundings and train a gaze policy to control it using reinforcement learning. We accomplish this by first collecting teleoperated demonstrations paired with a 360 camera. This data is imported into a simulation environment that supports rendering arbitrary eyeball viewpoints, allowing episode rollouts of eye gaze on top of robot demonstrations. We then introduce a BC-RL loop to train the hand and eye jointly: the hand (BC) agent is trained from rendered eye observations, and the eye (RL) agent is rewarded when the hand produces correct action predictions. In this way, hand-eye coordination emerges as the eye looks towards regions which allow the hand to complete the task. EyeRobot implements a foveal-inspired policy architecture allowing high resolution with a small compute budget, which we find also leads to the emergence of more stable fixation as well as improved ability to track objects and ignore distractors. We evaluate EyeRobot on five panoramic workspace manipulation tasks requiring manipulation in an arc surrounding the robot arm. Our experiments suggest EyeRobot exhibits hand-eye coordination behaviors which effectively facilitate manipulation over large workspaces with a single camera. See project site for videos: https://www.eyerobot.net/

We address the problem of gaze target estimation, which aims to predict where a person is looking in a scene. Predicting a person's gaze target requires reasoning both about the person's appearance and the contents of the scene. Prior works have developed increasingly complex, hand-crafted pipelines for gaze target estimation that carefully fuse features from separate scene encoders, head encoders, and auxiliary models for signals like depth and pose. Motivated by the success of general-purpose feature extractors on a variety of visual tasks, we propose Gaze-LLE, a novel transformer framework that streamlines gaze target estimation by leveraging features from a frozen DINOv2 encoder. We extract a single feature representation for the scene, and apply a person-specific positional prompt to decode gaze with a lightweight module. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across several gaze benchmarks and provide extensive analysis to validate our design choices. Our code is available at: http://github.com/fkryan/gazelle .

From a falcon detecting prey to humans recognizing faces, many species exhibit extraordinary abilities in rapid visual localization and classification. These are made possible by a specialized retinal region called the fovea, which provides high acuity at the center of vision while maintaining lower resolution in the periphery. This distinctive spatial organization, preserved along the early visual pathway through retinotopic mapping, is fundamental to biological vision, yet remains largely unexplored in machine learning. Our study investigates how incorporating foveated retinotopy may benefit deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks. By implementing a foveated retinotopic transformation in the input layer of standard ResNet models and re-training them, we maintain comparable classification accuracy while enhancing the network's robustness to scale and rotational perturbations. Although this architectural modification introduces increased sensitivity to fixation point shifts, we demonstrate how this apparent limitation becomes advantageous: variations in classification probabilities across different gaze positions serve as effective indicators for object localization. Our findings suggest that foveated retinotopic mapping encodes implicit knowledge about visual object geometry, offering an efficient solution to the visual search problem - a capability crucial for many living species.

Inter-personal anatomical differences limit the accuracy of person-independent gaze estimation networks. Yet there is a need to lower gaze errors further to enable applications requiring higher quality. Further gains can be achieved by personalizing gaze networks, ideally with few calibration samples. However, over-parameterized neural networks are not amenable to learning from few examples as they can quickly over-fit. We embrace these challenges and propose a novel framework for Few-shot Adaptive GaZE Estimation (FAZE) for learning person-specific gaze networks with very few (less than or equal to 9) calibration samples. FAZE learns a rotation-aware latent representation of gaze via a disentangling encoder-decoder architecture along with a highly adaptable gaze estimator trained using meta-learning. It is capable of adapting to any new person to yield significant performance gains with as few as 3 samples, yielding state-of-the-art performance of 3.18 degrees on GazeCapture, a 19% improvement over prior art. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/few_shot_gaze

Attention guides our gaze to fixate the proper location of the scene and holds it in that location for the deserved amount of time given current processing demands, before shifting to the next one. As such, gaze deployment crucially is a temporal process. Existing computational models have made significant strides in predicting spatial aspects of observer's visual scanpaths (where to look), while often putting on the background the temporal facet of attention dynamics (when). In this paper we present TPP-Gaze, a novel and principled approach to model scanpath dynamics based on Neural Temporal Point Process (TPP), that jointly learns the temporal dynamics of fixations position and duration, integrating deep learning methodologies with point process theory. We conduct extensive experiments across five publicly available datasets. Our results show the overall superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/phuselab/tppgaze.

Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) models trained on human-like egocentric visual inputs substantially underperform on image recognition tasks compared to humans. These models train on raw, uniform visual inputs collected from head-mounted cameras. This is different from humans, as the anatomical structure of the retina and visual cortex relatively amplifies the central visual information, i.e. around humans' gaze location. This selective amplification in humans likely aids in forming object-centered visual representations. Here, we investigate whether focusing on central visual information boosts egocentric visual object learning. We simulate 5-months of egocentric visual experience using the large-scale Ego4D dataset and generate gaze locations with a human gaze prediction model. To account for the importance of central vision in humans, we crop the visual area around the gaze location. Finally, we train a time-based SSL model on these modified inputs. Our experiments demonstrate that focusing on central vision leads to better object-centered representations. Our analysis shows that the SSL model leverages the temporal dynamics of the gaze movements to build stronger visual representations. Overall, our work marks a significant step toward bio-inspired learning of visual representations.

Diffusion and flow matching models have unlocked unprecedented capabilities for creative content creation, such as interactive image and streaming video generation. The growing demand for higher resolutions, frame rates, and context lengths, however, makes efficient generation increasingly challenging, as computational complexity grows quadratically with the number of generated tokens. Our work seeks to optimize the efficiency of the generation process in settings where the user's gaze location is known or can be estimated, for example, by using eye tracking. In these settings, we leverage the eccentricity-dependent acuity of human vision: while a user perceives very high-resolution visual information in a small region around their gaze location (the foveal region), the ability to resolve detail quickly degrades in the periphery of the visual field. Our approach starts with a mask modeling the foveated resolution to allocate tokens non-uniformly, assigning higher token density to foveal regions and lower density to peripheral regions. An image or video is generated in a mixed-resolution token setting, yielding results perceptually indistinguishable from full-resolution generation, while drastically reducing the token count and generation time. To this end, we develop a principled mechanism for constructing mixed-resolution tokens directly from high-resolution data, allowing a foveated diffusion model to be post-trained from an existing base model while maintaining content consistency across resolutions. We validate our approach through extensive analysis and a carefully designed user study, demonstrating the efficacy of foveation as a practical and scalable axis for efficient generation.

Estimating human gaze targets from images in-the-wild is an important and formidable task. Existing approaches primarily employ brittle, multi-stage pipelines that require explicit inputs, like head bounding boxes and human pose, in order to identify the subject of gaze analysis. As a result, detection errors can cascade and lead to failure. Moreover, these prior works lack the flexibility of specifying the gaze analysis task via natural language prompting, an approach which has been shown to have significant benefits in convenience and scalability for other image analysis tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Promptable Gaze Target Estimation (PGE) task, a new end-to-end, concept-driven paradigm for gaze analysis. PGE conditions gaze prediction on flexible user text or visual prompts (e.g., "the boy in the red shirt" or "person in point [0.52, 0.48]") to identify a specific subject for gaze analysis. This approach integrates subject localization with gaze estimation, and eliminates the rigid dependency on intermediate analysis stages. We develop a scalable data engine to generate Gaze-Co (Gaze Estimation with Concepts), a dataset and benchmark of 120K high-quality, prompt-annotated image pairs. We also propose GazeAnywhere, the first model designed for PGE. GazeAnywhere uses a transformer-based detector to fuse features from frozen encoders and simultaneously solves subject localization, in/out-of-frame presence, and gaze target heatmap estimation. GazeAnywhere achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple PGE benchmarks, setting a strong baseline for this new problem even on a difficult out-of-domain, real-world clinical dataset. GazeAnywhere is open-sourced in github.com/IrohXu/GazeAnywhere.

Estimating human gaze target from visible images is a critical task for robots to understand human attention, yet the development of generalizable neural architectures and training paradigms remains challenging. While recent advances in pre-trained vision foundation models offer promising avenues for locating gaze targets, the integration of multi-modal cues -- including eyes, head poses, gestures, and contextual features -- demands adaptive and efficient decoding mechanisms. Inspired by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for adaptive domain expertise in large vision-language models, we propose GazeMoE, a novel end-to-end framework that selectively leverages gaze-target-related cues from a frozen foundation model through MoE modules. To address class imbalance in gaze target classification (in-frame vs. out-of-frame) and enhance robustness, GazeMoE incorporates a class-balancing auxiliary loss alongside strategic data augmentations, including region-specific cropping and photometric transformations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our GazeMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods on challenging gaze estimation tasks. The code and pre-trained models are released at https://huggingface.co/zdai257/GazeMoE

Visual attention plays a critical role when our visual system executes active visual tasks by interacting with the physical scene. However, how to encode the visual object relationship in the psychological world of our brain deserves to be explored. In the field of computer vision, predicting visual fixations or scanpaths is a usual way to explore the visual attention and behaviors of human observers when viewing a scene. Most existing methods encode visual attention using individual fixations or scanpaths based on the raw gaze shift data collected from human observers. This may not capture the common attention pattern well, because without considering the semantic information of the viewed scene, raw gaze shift data alone contain high inter- and intra-observer variability. To address this issue, we propose a new attention representation, called Attention Graph, to simultaneously code the visual saliency and scanpath in a graph-based representation and better reveal the common attention behavior of human observers. In the attention graph, the semantic-based scanpath is defined by the path on the graph, while saliency of objects can be obtained by computing fixation density on each node. Systemic experiments demonstrate that the proposed attention graph combined with our new evaluation metrics provides a better benchmark for evaluating attention prediction methods. Meanwhile, extra experiments demonstrate the promising potentials of the proposed attention graph in assessing human cognitive states, such as autism spectrum disorder screening and age classification.

Predicting human gaze scanpaths is crucial for understanding visual attention, with applications in human-computer interaction, autonomous systems, and cognitive robotics. While deep learning models have advanced scanpath prediction, most existing approaches generate averaged behaviors, failing to capture the variability of human visual exploration. In this work, we present ScanDiff, a novel architecture that combines diffusion models with Vision Transformers to generate diverse and realistic scanpaths. Our method explicitly models scanpath variability by leveraging the stochastic nature of diffusion models, producing a wide range of plausible gaze trajectories. Additionally, we introduce textual conditioning to enable task-driven scanpath generation, allowing the model to adapt to different visual search objectives. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that ScanDiff surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both free-viewing and task-driven scenarios, producing more diverse and accurate scanpaths. These results highlight its ability to better capture the complexity of human visual behavior, pushing forward gaze prediction research. Source code and models are publicly available at https://aimagelab.github.io/ScanDiff.

Medical eye-tracking data is an important information source for understanding how radiologists visually interpret medical images. This information not only improves the accuracy of deep learning models for X-ray analysis but also their interpretability, enhancing transparency in decision-making. However, the current eye-tracking data is dispersed, unprocessed, and ambiguous, making it difficult to derive meaningful insights. Therefore, there is a need to create a new dataset with more focus and purposeful eyetracking data, improving its utility for diagnostic applications. In this work, we propose a refinement method inspired by the target-present visual search challenge: there is a specific finding and fixations are guided to locate it. After refining the existing eye-tracking datasets, we transform them into a curated visual search dataset, called GazeSearch, specifically for radiology findings, where each fixation sequence is purposefully aligned to the task of locating a particular finding. Subsequently, we introduce a scan path prediction baseline, called ChestSearch, specifically tailored to GazeSearch. Finally, we employ the newly introduced GazeSearch as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of current state-of-the-art methods, offering a comprehensive assessment for visual search in the medical imaging domain. Code is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/GazeSearch.

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.

Gaze following aims to interpret human-scene interactions by predicting the person's focal point of gaze. Prevailing approaches often adopt a two-stage framework, whereby multi-modality information is extracted in the initial stage for gaze target prediction. Consequently, the efficacy of these methods highly depends on the precision of the preceding modality extraction. Others use a single-modality approach with complex decoders, increasing network computational load. Inspired by the remarkable success of pre-trained plain vision transformers (ViTs), we introduce a novel single-modality gaze following framework called ViTGaze. In contrast to previous methods, it creates a novel gaze following framework based mainly on powerful encoders (relative decoder parameters less than 1%). Our principal insight is that the inter-token interactions within self-attention can be transferred to interactions between humans and scenes. Leveraging this presumption, we formulate a framework consisting of a 4D interaction encoder and a 2D spatial guidance module to extract human-scene interaction information from self-attention maps. Furthermore, our investigation reveals that ViT with self-supervised pre-training has an enhanced ability to extract correlation information. Many experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among all single-modality methods (3.4% improvement in the area under curve (AUC) score, 5.1% improvement in the average precision (AP)) and very comparable performance against multi-modality methods with 59% number of parameters less.

In this paper, we introduce an underexplored problem in facial analysis: generating and recognizing multi-attribute natural language descriptions, containing facial action units (AUs), emotional states, and age estimation, for arbitrarily selected face regions (termed FaceFocalDesc). We argue that the system's ability to focus on individual facial areas leads to better understanding and control. To achieve this capability, we construct a new multi-attribute description dataset for arbitrarily selected face regions, providing rich region-level annotations and natural language descriptions. Further, we propose a fine-tuned vision-language model based on Qwen2.5-VL, called Focal-RegionFace for facial state analysis, which incrementally refines its focus on localized facial features through multiple progressively fine-tuning stages, resulting in interpretable age estimation, FAU and emotion detection. Experimental results show that Focal-RegionFace achieves the best performance on the new benchmark in terms of traditional and widely used metrics, as well as new proposed metrics. This fully verifies its effectiveness and versatility in fine-grained multi-attribute face region-focal analysis scenarios.

Understanding radiologists' eye movement during Computed Tomography (CT) reading is crucial for developing effective interpretable computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, CT research in this area has been limited by the lack of publicly available eye-tracking datasets and the three-dimensional complexity of CT volumes. To address these challenges, we present the first publicly available eye gaze dataset on CT, called CT-ScanGaze. Then, we introduce CT-Searcher, a novel 3D scanpath predictor designed specifically to process CT volumes and generate radiologist-like 3D fixation sequences, overcoming the limitations of current scanpath predictors that only handle 2D inputs. Since deep learning models benefit from a pretraining step, we develop a pipeline that converts existing 2D gaze datasets into 3D gaze data to pretrain CT-Searcher. Through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on CT-ScanGaze, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and provide a comprehensive assessment framework for 3D scanpath prediction in medical imaging.

This paper introduces neck-mounted view gaze estimation, a new task that estimates user gaze from the neck-mounted camera perspective. Prior work on egocentric gaze estimation, which predicts device wearer's gaze location within the camera's field of view, mainly focuses on head-mounted cameras while alternative viewpoints remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we collect the first dataset for this task, consisting of approximately 4 hours of video collected from 8 participants during everyday activities. We evaluate a transformer-based gaze estimation model, GLC, on the new dataset and propose two extensions: an auxiliary gaze out-of-bound classification task and a multi-view co-learning approach that jointly trains head-view and neck-view models using a geometry-aware auxiliary loss. Experimental results show that incorporating gaze out-of-bound classification improves performance over standard fine-tuning, while the co-learning approach does not yield gains. We further analyze these results and discuss implications for neck-mounted gaze estimation.

Understanding human visual attention on a scene over time has applications in domains such as interface design and inferring cognitive states. Modeling visual scanpaths has historically relied on specialized architectures with hand-crafted priors. While these architectures can model fixation sequences, their rigid structural biases restrict easy extendability and flexible conditioning. For instance, integrating task-specific instructions or adapting to distinct viewer identities requires custom, disjoint architectural additions. We frame scanpath prediction purely as a discrete sequence modeling task. By mapping coordinates into a text vocabulary, we leverage the pretrained representations of Vision-Language Models. This framing absorbs diverse factors of variation: simple prompting allows for global conditioning, such as providing viewer identities to capture personalized biases, or task-specific objectives like visual search. The framework can also integrate per-fixation attributes, such as individual fixation durations, alongside spatial locations. The autoregressive alignment enables the scalable, exact computation of per-fixation log-likelihoods, directly equivalent to the commonly used Information Gain (IG) metric. Our model, DeepGaze3.5-VL, establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple datasets, achieving 2.18 bits of IG on MIT1003, a 46% improvement over DeepGaze III. This advantage persists even when baselines use identical high-capacity vision encoders. Beyond predictive performance, our generative framework serves as a powerful computational tool for direct behavioral interventions, allowing for controlled in-silico simulations that would be experimentally difficult or impossible to conduct in vivo. We demonstrate this ability by performing controlled interventions on the durations of pre-saccadic fixations, recovering known oculomotor phenomena purely from data.

Understanding how attention varies across individuals has significant scientific and societal impacts. However, existing visual scanpath models treat attention uniformly, neglecting individual differences. To bridge this gap, this paper focuses on individualized scanpath prediction (ISP), a new attention modeling task that aims to accurately predict how different individuals shift their attention in diverse visual tasks. It proposes an ISP method featuring three novel technical components: (1) an observer encoder to characterize and integrate an observer's unique attention traits, (2) an observer-centric feature integration approach that holistically combines visual features, task guidance, and observer-specific characteristics, and (3) an adaptive fixation prioritization mechanism that refines scanpath predictions by dynamically prioritizing semantic feature maps based on individual observers' attention traits. These novel components allow scanpath models to effectively address the attention variations across different observers. Our method is generally applicable to different datasets, model architectures, and visual tasks, offering a comprehensive tool for transforming general scanpath models into individualized ones. Comprehensive evaluations using value-based and ranking-based metrics verify the method's effectiveness and generalizability.

Most models of visual attention aim at predicting either top-down or bottom-up control, as studied using different visual search and free-viewing tasks. In this paper we propose the Human Attention Transformer (HAT), a single model that predicts both forms of attention control. HAT uses a novel transformer-based architecture and a simplified foveated retina that collectively create a spatio-temporal awareness akin to the dynamic visual working memory of humans. HAT not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in predicting the scanpath of fixations made during target-present and target-absent visual search and ``taskless'' free viewing, but also makes human gaze behavior interpretable. Unlike previous methods that rely on a coarse grid of fixation cells and experience information loss due to fixation discretization, HAT features a sequential dense prediction architecture and outputs a dense heatmap for each fixation, thus avoiding discretizing fixations. HAT sets a new standard in computational attention, which emphasizes effectiveness, generality, and interpretability. HAT's demonstrated scope and applicability will likely inspire the development of new attention models that can better predict human behavior in various attention-demanding scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/HAT.

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans and serve many important roles e.g. search and rescue, blind assistance, emotional support. However, few datasets exist to categorize visual features and objects available to dogs, as well as how dogs direct their visual attention within their environment. We collect and study a dataset with over 11,698 gazes to categorize the objects available to be gazed at by 11 dogs in everyday outdoor environments i.e. a walk around a college campus and urban area. We explore the availability of these object categories and the visual attention of dogs over these categories using a head mounted eye tracking apparatus. A small portion (approx. 600 images or < 20% of total dataset) of the collected data is used to fine tune a MaskRCNN for the novel image domain to segment objects present in the scene, enabling further statistical analysis on the visual gaze tendencies of dogs. The MaskRCNN, with eye tracking apparatus, serves as an end to end model for automatically classifying the visual fixations of dogs. The fine tuned MaskRCNN performs far better than chance. There are few individual differences between the 11 dogs and we observe greater visual fixations on buses, plants, pavement, and construction equipment. This work takes a step towards understanding visual behavior of dogs and their interaction with the physical world.

Gaze redirection is the task of changing the gaze to a desired direction for a given monocular eye patch image. Many applications such as videoconferencing, films, games, and generation of training data for gaze estimation require redirecting the gaze, without distorting the appearance of the area surrounding the eye and while producing photo-realistic images. Existing methods lack the ability to generate perceptually plausible images. In this work, we present a novel method to alleviate this problem by leveraging generative adversarial training to synthesize an eye image conditioned on a target gaze direction. Our method ensures perceptual similarity and consistency of synthesized images to the real images. Furthermore, a gaze estimation loss is used to control the gaze direction accurately. To attain high-quality images, we incorporate perceptual and cycle consistency losses into our architecture. In extensive evaluations we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both image quality and redirection precision. Finally, we show that generated images can bring significant improvement for the gaze estimation task if used to augment real training data.

Gaze behaviors such as eye-contact or shared attention are important markers for diagnosing developmental disorders in children. While previous studies have looked at some of these elements, the analysis is usually performed on private datasets and is restricted to lab settings. Furthermore, all publicly available gaze target prediction benchmarks mostly contain instances of adults, which makes models trained on them less applicable to scenarios with young children. In this paper, we propose the first study for predicting the gaze target of children and interacting adults. To this end, we introduce the ChildPlay dataset: a curated collection of short video clips featuring children playing and interacting with adults in uncontrolled environments (e.g. kindergarten, therapy centers, preschools etc.), which we annotate with rich gaze information. We further propose a new model for gaze target prediction that is geometrically grounded by explicitly identifying the scene parts in the 3D field of view (3DFoV) of the person, leveraging recent geometry preserving depth inference methods. Our model achieves state of the art results on benchmark datasets and ChildPlay. Furthermore, results show that looking at faces prediction performance on children is much worse than on adults, and can be significantly improved by fine-tuning models using child gaze annotations. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available.

In an era where wearable technology is reshaping applications, Scene Text Detection and Recognition (STDR) becomes a straightforward choice through the lens of egocentric vision. Leveraging Meta's Project Aria smart glasses, this paper investigates how environmental variables, such as lighting, distance, and resolution, affect the performance of state-of-the-art STDR algorithms in real-world scenarios. We introduce a novel, custom-built dataset captured under controlled conditions and evaluate two OCR pipelines: EAST with CRNN, and EAST with PyTesseract. Our findings reveal that resolution and distance significantly influence recognition accuracy, while lighting plays a less predictable role. Notably, image upscaling emerged as a key pre-processing technique, reducing Character Error Rate (CER) from 0.65 to 0.48. We further demonstrate the potential of integrating eye-gaze tracking to optimise processing efficiency by focusing on user attention zones. This work not only benchmarks STDR performance under realistic conditions but also lays the groundwork for adaptive, user-aware AR systems. Our contributions aim to inspire future research in robust, context-sensitive text recognition for assistive and research-oriented applications, such as asset inspection and nutrition analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/josepDe/Project_Aria_STR.

Accurately modelling human attention is essential for numerous computer vision applications, particularly in the domain of automotive safety. Existing methods typically collapse gaze into saliency maps or scanpaths, treating gaze dynamics only implicitly. We instead formulate gaze modelling as an autoregressive dynamical system and explicitly unroll raw gaze trajectories over time, conditioned on both gaze history and the evolving environment. Driving scenes are represented as gaze-centric graphs processed by the Affinity Relation Transformer (ART), a heterogeneous graph transformer that models interactions between driver gaze, traffic objects, and road structure. We further introduce the Object Density Network (ODN) to predict next-step gaze distributions, capturing the stochastic and object-centric nature of attentional shifts in complex environments. We also release Focus100, a new dataset of raw gaze data from 30 participants viewing egocentric driving footage. Trained directly on raw gaze, without fixation filtering, our unified approach produces more natural gaze trajectories, scanpath dynamics, and saliency maps than existing attention models, offering valuable insights for the temporal modelling of human attention in dynamic environments.

Readers can have different goals with respect to the text they are reading. Can these goals be decoded from the pattern of their eye movements over the text? In this work, we examine for the first time whether it is possible to decode two types of reading goals that are common in daily life: information seeking and ordinary reading. Using large scale eye-tracking data, we apply to this task a wide range of state-of-the-art models for eye movements and text that cover different architectural and data representation strategies, and further introduce a new model ensemble. We systematically evaluate these models at three levels of generalization: new textual item, new participant, and the combination of both. We find that eye movements contain highly valuable signals for this task. We further perform an error analysis which builds on prior empirical findings on differences between ordinary reading and information seeking and leverages rich textual annotations. This analysis reveals key properties of textual items and participant eye movements that contribute to the difficulty of the task.

Different types of user interfaces differ significantly in the number of elements and how they are displayed. To examine how such differences affect the way users look at UIs, we collected and analyzed a large eye-tracking-based dataset, UEyes (62 participants, 1,980 UI screenshots, near 20K eye movement sequences), covering four major UI types: webpage, desktop UI, mobile UI, and poster. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the differences in important factors, such as color, location, and gaze direction across UI types, individual viewing strategies and potential future directions. This position paper is a derivative of our recent paper with a particular focus on the UEyes dataset.

Understanding human gaze behavior is essential for complex scene comprehension and human-computer interaction. Traditional gaze following models are typically restricted to pure spatial localization, lacking the high-level capacity to reason about semantic targets or complex social contexts. Furthermore, these models often process individuals sequentially, requiring redundant computations over the same scene image for multi-person inference. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer the exceptional semantic reasoning needed to address gaze-related semantic tasks, their reliance on discrete text generation inherently limits precision in continuous spatial tasks like gaze localization. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniGF, a unified vision-language framework that adapts foundational VLMs for highly scalable multi-person gaze reasoning. The model adopts a dual-branch decoding strategy: a structured language branch generates discrete reasoning states, while a continuous spatial branch directly taps into the VLM's dense hidden states. Supervising these extracted representations with high-resolution gaze target heatmaps effectively overcomes the spatial bottleneck of text-only coordinate generation. Furthermore, to explicitly ground the model in multi-person scenes, we augment the input with head embeddings encoded from cropped head images, providing fine-grained appearance and orientation cues for all individuals simultaneously. By modeling all individuals and leveraging the strong semantic capability of VLMs, OmniGF seamlessly integrates precise spatial gaze target estimation, semantic gaze prediction, and complex social gaze reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance across multiple standard benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/omnigf.

Video recordings of child-caregiver interactions enable investigation of attentional dynamics during naturalistic behavior. Such multimodal recording also allows researchers to examine how attention interacts with action and language use in real time. However, manual annotation of such data is time-consuming. Here, we introduce GazeBehavior Annotation Toolkit, a deep-learning-based toolkit designed to facilitate three key processes in data preprocessing and feature extraction: post-hoc synchronization across multiple videos, semi-automatic annotation of gaze target categories, and categorization of participants' poses and hand actions. This toolkit improves the efficiency and scalability of feature extraction from human egocentric eye-tracking and video data. Such improvement is critical in supporting large-scale and longitudinal investigations of attentional dynamics and naturalistic behavior in human early development.

Eye-tracking analysis plays a vital role in medical imaging, providing key insights into how radiologists visually interpret and diagnose clinical cases. In this work, we first analyze radiologists' attention and agreement by measuring the distribution of various eye-movement patterns, including saccades direction, amplitude, and their joint distribution. These metrics help uncover patterns in attention allocation and diagnostic strategies. Furthermore, we investigate whether and how doctors' gaze behavior shifts when viewing authentic (Real) versus deep-learning-generated (Fake) images. To achieve this, we examine fixation bias maps, focusing on first, last, short, and longest fixations independently, along with detailed saccades patterns, to quantify differences in gaze distribution and visual saliency between authentic and synthetic images.

In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information, participants coordinate their understanding through interaction. We ask whether gaze provides evidence about grounding across two such tasks. Working from discrete behavioral annotations, we map HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) and MUNDEX (Türk et al., 2023) into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. In both corpora, aligned reference interpretations (MapTask) and UND (understood) judgments (MUNDEX) are associated with more task-directed gaze and with less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions. The associations are clearest for the participant leading the task: in giver-produced references, and in explainer judgments, which also co-vary with the explainee's gaze. In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, the speaker's gaze entropy is lower at the mention where a previously non-aligned referent becomes aligned. The best gaze feature groups improve modestly over controls under grouped cross-validation: temporal features in MapTask and raw proportions in MUNDEX. Because effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, we treat gaze as one contributing cue to grounding, to be interpreted alongside task and dialogue context.

How different populations visually explore artworks bears on cognitive science and on accessibility design, yet most eye-tracking work in autism has used social scenes rather than art, and has analysed where the eyes land while ignoring when and in what order. We present a comparative free-viewing study across three groups, autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers, who each viewed 30 paintings for 15s. We introduce a directed, metric-grounded framework that compares groups along two complementary axes: a spatial axis, in which one group's fixation-density map predicts another's fixations under six saliency metrics (AUC-Judd, NSS, CC, SIM, KL, Information Gain); and a temporal axis, in which individual scanpaths are compared with MultiMatch, ScanMatch, a foveal-disc IoU score (FDISS), and dynamic time warping (DTW). Fixations are extracted uniformly for all groups with a dispersion-threshold algorithm. Three results converge. (i)Artists and neurotypicals are almost indistinguishable in both space (density-map correlation CC=0.96) and time (they form the most alignable scanpath pair), whereas ASD gaze diverges from both. (ii)ASD attention is dissociated: it matches artists' wide spatial exploration (dispersion, explored area) but carries a distinct temporal signature, shorter fixations, less dwell, and the most idiosyncratic (least self-consistent) scanpaths of any group. (iii)ASD gaze is not selectively artist-like on any metric; if anything it is marginally closer to neurotypical. Together these findings indicate that autistic viewing of art is a distinct, group-specific attentional profile in both space and time, and they motivate population-conditioned models of aesthetic attention. We release all analysis code and per-stimulus results.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically learn visual capacity through visual instruction tuning, involving updates to both a projector and their LLM backbones. Drawing inspiration from the concept of visual region in the human brain, we investigate the existence of an analogous visual region within LLMs that functions as a cognitive core, and explore the possibility of efficient training of LVLMs via selective layers tuning. We use Bunny-Llama-3-8B-V for detailed experiments and LLaVA-1.5-7B and LLaVA-1.5-13B for validation across a range of visual and textual tasks. Our findings reveal that selectively updating 25\% of LLMs layers, when sparsely and uniformly distributed, can preserve nearly 99\% of visual performance while maintaining or enhancing textual task results, and also effectively reducing training time. Based on this targeted training approach, we further propose a novel visual region-based pruning paradigm, removing non-critical layers outside the visual region, which can achieve minimal performance loss. This study offers an effective and efficient strategy for LVLM training and inference by activating a layer-wise visual region within LLMs, which is consistently effective across different models and parameter scales.

Learning-based methods are believed to work well for unconstrained gaze estimation, i.e. gaze estimation from a monocular RGB camera without assumptions regarding user, environment, or camera. However, current gaze datasets were collected under laboratory conditions and methods were not evaluated across multiple datasets. Our work makes three contributions towards addressing these limitations. First, we present the MPIIGaze that contains 213,659 full face images and corresponding ground-truth gaze positions collected from 15 users during everyday laptop use over several months. An experience sampling approach ensured continuous gaze and head poses and realistic variation in eye appearance and illumination. To facilitate cross-dataset evaluations, 37,667 images were manually annotated with eye corners, mouth corners, and pupil centres. Second, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods on three current datasets, including MPIIGaze. We study key challenges including target gaze range, illumination conditions, and facial appearance variation. We show that image resolution and the use of both eyes affect gaze estimation performance while head pose and pupil centre information are less informative. Finally, we propose GazeNet, the first deep appearance-based gaze estimation method. GazeNet improves the state of the art by 22% percent (from a mean error of 13.9 degrees to 10.8 degrees) for the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation.

Contextual cues related to a person's pose and interactions with objects and other people in the scene can provide valuable information for gaze following. While existing methods have focused on dedicated cue extraction methods, in this work we investigate the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for extracting a wide array of contextual cues to improve gaze following performance. We first evaluate various VLMs, prompting strategies, and in-context learning (ICL) techniques for zero-shot cue recognition performance. We then use these insights to extract contextual cues for gaze following, and investigate their impact when incorporated into a state of the art model for the task. Our analysis indicates that BLIP-2 is the overall top performing VLM and that ICL can improve performance. We also observe that VLMs are sensitive to the choice of the text prompt although ensembling over multiple text prompts can provide more robust performance. Additionally, we discover that using the entire image along with an ellipse drawn around the target person is the most effective strategy for visual prompting. For gaze following, incorporating the extracted cues results in better generalization performance, especially when considering a larger set of cues, highlighting the potential of this approach.

The visual scanpath is a sequence of points through which the human gaze moves while exploring a scene. It represents the fundamental concepts upon which visual attention research is based. As a result, the ability to predict them has emerged as an important task in recent years. In this paper, we propose an inter-observer consistent adversarial training approach for scanpath prediction through a lightweight deep neural network. The adversarial method employs a discriminative neural network as a dynamic loss that is better suited to model the natural stochastic phenomenon while maintaining consistency between the distributions related to the subjective nature of scanpaths traversed by different observers. Through extensive testing, we show the competitiveness of our approach in regard to state-of-the-art methods.

Zero-shot image classification using auxiliary information, such as attributes describing discriminative object properties, requires time-consuming annotation by domain experts. We instead propose a method that relies on human gaze as auxiliary information, exploiting that even non-expert users have a natural ability to judge class membership. We present a data collection paradigm that involves a discrimination task to increase the information content obtained from gaze data. Our method extracts discriminative descriptors from the data and learns a compatibility function between image and gaze using three novel gaze embeddings: Gaze Histograms (GH), Gaze Features with Grid (GFG) and Gaze Features with Sequence (GFS). We introduce two new gaze-annotated datasets for fine-grained image classification and show that human gaze data is indeed class discriminative, provides a competitive alternative to expert-annotated attributes, and outperforms other baselines for zero-shot image classification.

We present a new computational model for gaze prediction in egocentric videos by exploring patterns in temporal shift of gaze fixations (attention transition) that are dependent on egocentric manipulation tasks. Our assumption is that the high-level context of how a task is completed in a certain way has a strong influence on attention transition and should be modeled for gaze prediction in natural dynamic scenes. Specifically, we propose a hybrid model based on deep neural networks which integrates task-dependent attention transition with bottom-up saliency prediction. In particular, the task-dependent attention transition is learned with a recurrent neural network to exploit the temporal context of gaze fixations, e.g. looking at a cup after moving gaze away from a grasped bottle. Experiments on public egocentric activity datasets show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art gaze prediction methods and is able to learn meaningful transition of human attention.

Along with the recent development of deep neural networks, appearance-based gaze estimation has succeeded considerably when training and testing within the same domain. Compared to the within-domain task, the variance of different domains makes the cross-domain performance drop severely, preventing gaze estimation deployment in real-world applications. Among all the factors, ranges of head pose and gaze are believed to play a significant role in the final performance of gaze estimation, while collecting large ranges of data is expensive. This work proposes an effective model training pipeline consisting of a training data synthesis and a gaze estimation model for unsupervised domain adaptation. The proposed data synthesis leverages the single-image 3D reconstruction to expand the range of the head poses from the source domain without requiring a 3D facial shape dataset. To bridge the inevitable gap between synthetic and real images, we further propose an unsupervised domain adaptation method suitable for synthetic full-face data. We propose a disentangling autoencoder network to separate gaze-related features and introduce background augmentation consistency loss to utilize the characteristics of the synthetic source domain. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that the model only using monocular-reconstructed synthetic training data can perform comparably to real data with a large label range. Our proposed domain adaptation approach further improves the performance on multiple target domains. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ut-vision/AdaptiveGaze.

Radiologists rely on eye movements to navigate and interpret medical images. A trained radiologist possesses knowledge about the potential diseases that may be present in the images and, when searching, follows a mental checklist to locate them using their gaze. This is a key observation, yet existing models fail to capture the underlying intent behind each fixation. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning-based approach, RadGazeIntent, designed to model this behavior: having an intention to find something and actively searching for it. Our transformer-based architecture processes both the temporal and spatial dimensions of gaze data, transforming fine-grained fixation features into coarse, meaningful representations of diagnostic intent to interpret radiologists' goals. To capture the nuances of radiologists' varied intention-driven behaviors, we process existing medical eye-tracking datasets to create three intention-labeled subsets: RadSeq (Systematic Sequential Search), RadExplore (Uncertainty-driven Exploration), and RadHybrid (Hybrid Pattern). Experimental results demonstrate RadGazeIntent's ability to predict which findings radiologists are examining at specific moments, outperforming baseline methods across all intention-labeled datasets.

Human visual search is serial: the fovea must land on a candidate to confirm it, and those landings form a scanpath. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs), given the same foveated input, search as humans do bears on their use as models of human vision and on attention-alignment scores. We compare three general-purpose MLLMs with human eye-movement scanpaths on goal-directed search (COCO-Search18), driving each model fixation by fixation through an identical, human-matched foveated view and assessing it along three axes: the decision of target presence, the efficiency of reaching the target, and the gaze process itself. The axes dissociate. On the decision and on target acquisition the models match or exceed humans, detecting present targets near ceiling and reaching them on the first saccade more often than people do. The gaze process is not human. Under the human-matched condition, all three share one signature: low-entropy, large-amplitude, self-consistent scanpaths that agree with themselves far more closely than two humans agree with each other. That is consistent with a single-pass, non-serial architecture rather than a limit of acuity. Matched retinal input reproduces where humans look but not how the looking unfolds in time, and no degradation regime recovers human-like search at human-like success. The gap sits on a process axis that answer-alignment and saliency metrics do not measure. Because they miss it, such metrics cannot certify human-like vision, and zero-shot models suit outcome and spatial questions but not temporal, process-level ones.

Robotic manipulation, owing to its multi-modal nature, often faces significant training ambiguity, necessitating explicit instructions to clearly delineate the manipulation details in tasks. In this work, we highlight that vision instruction is naturally more comprehensible to recent robotic policies than the commonly adopted text instruction, as these policies are born with some vision understanding ability like human infants. Building on this premise and drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we introduce the robotic imagery paradigm, which realizes large-scale robotic data pre-training without text annotations. Additionally, we propose the robotic gaze strategy that emulates the human eye gaze mechanism, thereby guiding subsequent actions and focusing the attention of the policy on the manipulated object. Leveraging these innovations, we develop VIRT, a fully Transformer-based policy. We design comprehensive tasks using both a physical robot and simulated environments to assess the efficacy of VIRT. The results indicate that VIRT can complete very competitive tasks like ``opening the lid of a tightly sealed bottle'', and the proposed techniques boost the success rates of the baseline policy on diverse challenging tasks from nearly 0% to more than 65%.

Developing gaze estimation models that generalize well to unseen domains and in-the-wild conditions remains a challenge with no known best solution. This is mostly due to the difficulty of acquiring ground truth data that cover the distribution of faces, head poses, and environments that exist in the real world. Most recent methods attempt to close the gap between specific source and target domains using domain adaptation. In this work, we propose to train general gaze estimation models which can be directly employed in novel environments without adaptation. To do so, we leverage the observation that head, body, and hand pose estimation benefit from revising them as dense 3D coordinate prediction, and similarly express gaze estimation as regression of dense 3D eye meshes. To close the gap between image domains, we create a large-scale dataset of diverse faces with gaze pseudo-annotations, which we extract based on the 3D geometry of the scene, and design a multi-view supervision framework to balance their effect during training. We test our method in the task of gaze generalization, in which we demonstrate improvement of up to 30% compared to state-of-the-art when no ground truth data are available, and up to 10% when they are. The project material are available for research purposes at https://github.com/Vagver/3DGazeNet.

Carousel interfaces are widely used in e-commerce and streaming services, but little research has been devoted to them. Previous studies of interfaces for presenting search and recommendation results have focused on single ranked lists, but it appears their results cannot be extrapolated to carousels due to the added complexity. Eye tracking is a highly informative approach to understanding how users click, yet there are no eye tracking studies concerning carousels. There are very few interaction datasets on recommenders with carousel interfaces and none that contain gaze data. We introduce the RecGaze dataset: the first comprehensive feedback dataset on carousels that includes eye tracking results, clicks, cursor movements, and selection explanations. The dataset comprises of interactions from 3 movie selection tasks with 40 different carousel interfaces per user. In total, 87 users and 3,477 interactions are logged. In addition to the dataset, its description and possible use cases, we provide results of a survey on carousel design and the first analysis of gaze data on carousels, which reveals a golden triangle or F-pattern browsing behavior. Our work seeks to advance the field of carousel interfaces by providing the first dataset with eye tracking results on carousels. In this manner, we provide and encourage an empirical understanding of interactions with carousel interfaces, for building better recommender systems through gaze information, and also encourage the development of gaze-based recommenders.

Gaze following and social gaze prediction are fundamental tasks providing insights into human communication behaviors, intent, and social interactions. Most previous approaches addressed these tasks separately, either by designing highly specialized social gaze models that do not generalize to other social gaze tasks or by considering social gaze inference as an ad-hoc post-processing of the gaze following task. Furthermore, the vast majority of gaze following approaches have proposed static models that can handle only one person at a time, therefore failing to take advantage of social interactions and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we address these limitations and introduce a novel framework to jointly predict the gaze target and social gaze label for all people in the scene. The framework comprises of: (i) a temporal, transformer-based architecture that, in addition to image tokens, handles person-specific tokens capturing the gaze information related to each individual; (ii) a new dataset, VSGaze, that unifies annotation types across multiple gaze following and social gaze datasets. We show that our model trained on VSGaze can address all tasks jointly, and achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-person gaze following and social gaze prediction.

Image retouching is commonly formulated as enhancing overall visual quality through color adjustment, but in practice, it also serves to emphasize visual focus by guiding viewers' attention toward a specific subject or region. Achieving such focus-oriented retouching is inherently challenging, as it requires well-coordinated global and local adjustments to manipulate perceptual saliency while maintaining visual naturalness. This intricate process typically demands substantial professional expertise. In this study, we propose EyeControl, a MLLM-driven agent with a diffusion-based retouching executor that enables visual focus enhancement under weak user intent. With only a few clicks or coarse strokes, EyeControl directs visual attention to the intended region, effectively "dotting the eye" of the image. The core idea is to explicitly link the weak user intention with the target editing region and the corresponding tonal adjustment operations during retouching. To achieve this, the system first interprets the intent and image content to infer the visual focus and generate structured intent guidance for the retouching executor. Second, the retouching executor is encouraged to respond more strongly to the target region, explicitly aligning its attention map with a designed pseudo-intent map. We also introduce an operation-consistency constraint to improve coordination between global and local adjustments, achieving more natural and coherent retouching. Additionally, we contribute ControlArt-Bench, a high-quality evaluation dataset for visual focus enhancement. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EyeControl yields perceptually appealing results with stronger intent alignment. Code can be found in https://github.com/DragonisCV/EyeControl.

Predicting human gaze is a core capability for applications ranging from web/UI design analysis to robotics and human-computer interaction. Yet, most visual attention modeling methods output only a dense saliency map, which is often insufficient for action: practitioners need to connect attention peaks to discrete elements in the scene (what) and understand the drivers of those peaks in context (why), while remaining robust to domain shift across natural images, commercial content, and UI/web layouts. We, therefore, introduce OpenVAM (Open-world Visual Attention Modeling with VLMs), a unified framework that jointly addresses universality and explainability across heterogeneous domains (natural scenes, commercial imagery, and UI/web layouts) and supervision modalities. OpenVAM adopts a decoupled-but-aligned design: a dedicated dense visual pathway provides stable, spatially precise localization, while an instruction-following vision--language semantic head generates grounded what/why explanations conditioned on the same image and data-type prompts. A three-stage training strategy preserves strong localization priors while progressively introducing language grounding and improving explanation alignment via parameter-efficient adaptation without perturbing the saliency branch. We further propose a scalable pipeline to generate multi-domain saliency-reason annotations for training and systematic evaluation. Experiments across diverse datasets show that OpenVAM improves robustness under domain shift while producing image-grounded explanations that make saliency predictions more interpretable.

Gaze target estimation, the task of predicting where a person is looking in a scene, is crucial to understanding human attention and intent. It is a challenging task that combines high-level understanding of global scene semantics and precise spatial reasoning using human appearance (e.g. pose, eye orientation). As a result, human-level performance remains elusive for existing models, limiting their practical application. To this end, we propose PaGE (Practical Gaze Estimator), a gaze estimation model that explicitly models the complex interaction between scene and head features. Using a PaGE model with a large ViT-H+ backbone as the teacher, we further distill student models with lighter backbones on a much larger and more diverse unlabeled dataset. The architectural improvements and novel training recipe allow PaGE to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several gaze estimation tasks, outperforming humans in 7 out of 9 metrics while reducing the human-AI gap by at least 60% in the remaining 2. The distilled student models retain most of the teacher's performance while being lightweight enough for practical deployment on robots and consumer devices. The code and model checkpoints are available at our project page.

Recent research has made significant progress in localizing and editing image regions based on text. However, most approaches treat these regions in isolation, relying solely on local cues without accounting for how each part contributes to the overall visual and semantic composition. This often results in inconsistent edits, unnatural transitions, or loss of coherence across the image. In this work, we propose Region in Context, a novel framework for text-conditioned image editing that performs multilevel semantic alignment between vision and language, inspired by the human ability to reason about edits in relation to the whole scene. Our method encourages each region to understand its role within the global image context, enabling precise and harmonized changes. At its core, the framework introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism: regions are represented with full-image context and aligned with detailed region-level descriptions, while the entire image is simultaneously matched to a comprehensive scene-level description generated by a large vision-language model. These descriptions serve as explicit verbal references of the intended content, guiding both local modifications and global structure. Experiments show that it produces more coherent and instruction-aligned results. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuyvuphuong/Region-in-Context.git

This paper proposes a novel framework for the use of eye movement patterns for biometric applications. Eye movements contain abundant information about cognitive brain functions, neural pathways, etc. In the proposed method, eye movement data is classified into fixations and saccades. Features extracted from fixations and saccades are used by a Gaussian Radial Basis Function Network (GRBFN) based method for biometric authentication. A score fusion approach is adopted to classify the data in the output layer. In the evaluation stage, the algorithm has been tested using two types of stimuli: random dot following on a screen and text reading. The results indicate the strength of eye movement pattern as a biometric modality. The algorithm has been evaluated on BioEye 2015 database and found to outperform all the other methods. Eye movements are generated by a complex oculomotor plant which is very hard to spoof by mechanical replicas. Use of eye movement dynamics along with iris recognition technology may lead to a robust counterfeit-resistant person identification system.

Gaze estimation is a fundamental task in many applications of computer vision, human computer interaction and robotics. Many state-of-the-art methods are trained and tested on custom datasets, making comparison across methods challenging. Furthermore, existing gaze estimation datasets have limited head pose and gaze variations, and the evaluations are conducted using different protocols and metrics. In this paper, we propose a new gaze estimation dataset called ETH-XGaze, consisting of over one million high-resolution images of varying gaze under extreme head poses. We collect this dataset from 110 participants with a custom hardware setup including 18 digital SLR cameras and adjustable illumination conditions, and a calibrated system to record ground truth gaze targets. We show that our dataset can significantly improve the robustness of gaze estimation methods across different head poses and gaze angles. Additionally, we define a standardized experimental protocol and evaluation metric on ETH-XGaze, to better unify gaze estimation research going forward. The dataset and benchmark website are available at https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2020/ETH-XGaze

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive results in medical image restoration, attributed to the multi-head self-attention (MSA) mechanism in the spatial dimension. However, the majority of existing Transformers conduct attention within fixed and coarsely partitioned regions (e.g. the entire image or fixed patches), resulting in interference from irrelevant regions and fragmentation of continuous image content. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Region Attention Transformer (RAT) that utilizes a region-based multi-head self-attention mechanism (R-MSA). The R-MSA dynamically partitions the input image into non-overlapping semantic regions using the robust Segment Anything Model (SAM) and then performs self-attention within these regions. This region partitioning is more flexible and interpretable, ensuring that only pixels from similar semantic regions complement each other, thereby eliminating interference from irrelevant regions. Moreover, we introduce a focal region loss to guide our model to adaptively focus on recovering high-difficulty regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RAT in various medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, and pathological image super-resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/Yaziwel/Region-Attention-Transformer-for-Medical-Image-Restoration.git{https://github.com/RAT}.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) based measurements of retinal layer thickness, such as the retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) and the ganglion cell with inner plexiform layer (GCIPL) are commonly used for the diagnosis and monitoring of glaucoma. Previously, machine learning techniques have utilized segmentation-based imaging features such as the peripapillary RNFL thickness and the cup-to-disc ratio. Here, we propose a deep learning technique that classifies eyes as healthy or glaucomatous directly from raw, unsegmented OCT volumes of the optic nerve head (ONH) using a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We compared the accuracy of this technique with various feature-based machine learning algorithms and demonstrated the superiority of the proposed deep learning based method. Logistic regression was found to be the best performing classical machine learning technique with an AUC of 0.89. In direct comparison, the deep learning approach achieved a substantially higher AUC of 0.94 with the additional advantage of providing insight into which regions of an OCT volume are important for glaucoma detection. Computing Class Activation Maps (CAM), we found that the CNN identified neuroretinal rim and optic disc cupping as well as the lamina cribrosa (LC) and its surrounding areas as the regions significantly associated with the glaucoma classification. These regions anatomically correspond to the well established and commonly used clinical markers for glaucoma diagnosis such as increased cup volume, cup diameter, and neuroretinal rim thinning at the superior and inferior segments.

Enabling robots to understand human gaze target is a crucial step to allow capabilities in downstream tasks, for example, attention estimation and movement anticipation in real-world human-robot interactions. Prior works have addressed the in-frame target localization problem with data-driven approaches by carefully removing out-of-frame samples. Vision-based gaze estimation methods, such as OpenFace, do not effectively absorb background information in images and cannot predict gaze target in situations where subjects look away from the camera. In this work, we propose a system to address the problem of 360-degree gaze target estimation from an image in generalized visual scenes. The system, named GazeTarget360, integrates conditional inference engines of an eye-contact detector, a pre-trained vision encoder, and a multi-scale-fusion decoder. Cross validation results show that GazeTarget360 can produce accurate and reliable gaze target predictions in unseen scenarios. This makes a first-of-its-kind system to predict gaze targets from realistic camera footage which is highly efficient and deployable. Our source code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/zdai257/DisengageNet.

We introduce RegionFocus, a visual test-time scaling approach for Vision Language Model Agents. Understanding webpages is challenging due to the visual complexity of GUI images and the large number of interface elements, making accurate action selection difficult. Our approach dynamically zooms in on relevant regions, reducing background clutter and improving grounding accuracy. To support this process, we propose an image-as-map mechanism that visualizes key landmarks at each step, providing a transparent action record and enables the agent to effectively choose among action candidates. Even with a simple region selection strategy, we observe significant performance gains of 28+\% on Screenspot-pro and 24+\% on WebVoyager benchmarks on top of two state-of-the-art open vision language model agents, UI-TARS and Qwen2.5-VL, highlighting the effectiveness of visual test-time scaling in interactive settings. We achieve a new state-of-the-art grounding performance of 61.6\% on the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark by applying RegionFocus to a Qwen2.5-VL-72B model. Our code will be released publicly at https://github.com/tiangeluo/RegionFocus.

To utilize visual information, Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) relies on the perception process of its vision encoder. The completeness and accuracy of visual perception significantly influence the precision of spatial reasoning, fine-grained understanding, and other tasks. However, MLLM still lacks the autonomous capability to control its own visual perception processes, for example, selectively reviewing specific regions of an image or focusing on information related to specific object categories. In this work, we propose the concept of Visual Perception Token, aiming to empower MLLM with a mechanism to control its visual perception processes. We design two types of Visual Perception Tokens, termed the Region Selection Token and the Vision Re-Encoding Token. MLLMs autonomously generate these tokens, just as they generate text, and use them to trigger additional visual perception actions. The Region Selection Token explicitly identifies specific regions in an image that require further perception, while the Vision Re-Encoding Token uses its hidden states as control signals to guide additional visual perception processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of these tokens in handling spatial reasoning, improving fine-grained understanding, and other tasks. On average, the introduction of Visual Perception Tokens improves the performance of a 2B model by 23.6\%, increasing its score from 0.572 to 0.708, and even outperforms a 7B parameter model by 13.4\% (from 0.624). Please check out our repo https://github.com/yu-rp/VisualPerceptionToken

The ability of gaze estimation models to generalize is often significantly hindered by various factors unrelated to gaze, especially when the training dataset is limited. Current strategies aim to address this challenge through different domain generalization techniques, yet they have had limited success due to the risk of overfitting when solely relying on value labels for regression. Recent progress in pre-trained vision-language models has motivated us to capitalize on the abundant semantic information available. We propose a novel approach in this paper, reframing the gaze estimation task as a vision-language alignment issue. Our proposed framework, named Language-Guided Gaze Estimation (LG-Gaze), learns continuous and geometry-sensitive features for gaze estimation benefit from the rich prior knowledges of vision-language models. Specifically, LG-Gaze aligns gaze features with continuous linguistic features through our proposed multimodal contrastive regression loss, which customizes adaptive weights for different negative samples. Furthermore, to better adapt to the labels for gaze estimation task, we propose a geometry-aware interpolation method to obtain more precise gaze embeddings. Through extensive experiments, we validate the efficacy of our framework in four different cross-domain evaluation tasks.

Saliency and scanpath models are developed almost exclusively on natural photographs, yet paintings are composed by artists to guide the viewer's eye and differ from photographs in texture, colour and abstraction. We introduce \avatt, a free-viewing eye-tracking dataset on paintings spanning sixteen art movements and five centuries, with scanpaths and fixations from participants (\spPerImageMin-- observers per painting). For every painting we release individual scanpaths with fixation timing and eye--screen distance, fixation maps, saliency maps smoothed at one degree of visual angle, temporal saliency videos and rich art metadata. We benchmark classic and deep saliency models against human agreement, revealing substantial headroom for art-aware models, and rank 44 scanpath-similarity measures, including a new language-free family of image-encoder metrics built on ten CNN, ViT and self-supervised encoders. With controls that remove viewing biases, we show that faces are fixated \faceEnrichtimes more than expected and within half a second, that local structure draws the eye, that composition rules fitted from image content predict where people look, and that art style shapes how much viewers agree. Dataset, code and a Python package are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Amine-CV/AVAtt.

Smart glasses with AI assistants are increasingly used in daily life. However, current systems lack awareness of the user's internal cognitive state, leaving them unable to proactively anticipate users' needs without access to cognitive load. Existing methods for assessing cognitive load either rely on impractical sensors for lightweight eyewear or utilize eye gaze-based models that suffer from poor interpretability, and require task-specific fine-tuning, often failing to generalize across individuals. We propose GazeMind, a gaze-guided LLM agent framework for cognitive load assessment on smart glasses. It encodes eye-tracking data into structured representations for LLM-based reasoning and provides interpretable cognitive load predictions. Importantly, GazeMind generalizes across scenarios without LLM fine-tuning through a novel task-guidance reasoning approach and achieves personalized adaptation by incorporating user-specific characteristics and historical references. To support evaluation, we introduce CogLoad-Bench, the largest gaze-based cognitive load dataset with 152 participants, 40+ hours of multimodal data, and 10K+ real-time annotations across controlled and real-world tasks. Experiments show that GazeMind achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming baselines by over 20% across all metrics.

Shadow, as a natural consequence of light interacting with objects, plays a crucial role in shaping the aesthetics of an image, which however also impairs the content visibility and overall visual quality. Recent shadow removal approaches employ the mechanism of attention, due to its effectiveness, as a key component. However, they often suffer from two issues including large model size and high computational complexity for practical use. To address these shortcomings, this work devises a lightweight yet accurate shadow removal framework. First, we analyze the characteristics of the shadow removal task to seek the key information required for reconstructing shadow regions and designing a novel regional attention mechanism to effectively capture such information. Then, we customize a Regional Attention Shadow Removal Model (RASM, in short), which leverages non-shadow areas to assist in restoring shadow ones. Unlike existing attention-based models, our regional attention strategy allows each shadow region to interact more rationally with its surrounding non-shadow areas, for seeking the regional contextual correlation between shadow and non-shadow areas. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed method delivers superior performance over other state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, making it appealing for practical applications.

Accurate eye segmentation can improve eye-gaze estimation and support interactive computing based on visual attention; however, existing eye segmentation methods suffer from issues such as person-dependent accuracy, lack of robustness, and an inability to be run in real-time. Here, we present the RITnet model, which is a deep neural network that combines U-Net and DenseNet. RITnet is under 1 MB and achieves 95.3\% accuracy on the 2019 OpenEDS Semantic Segmentation challenge. Using a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, RITnet tracks at > 300Hz, enabling real-time gaze tracking applications. Pre-trained models and source code are available https://bitbucket.org/eye-ush/ritnet/.

We address the challenge of predicting human visual attention during real-world navigation by measuring and modeling egocentric pedestrian eye gaze in an outdoor campus setting. We introduce the EgoCampus dataset, which spans 25 unique outdoor paths over 6 km across a university campus with recordings from more than 80 distinct human pedestrians, resulting in a diverse set of gaze-annotated videos. The system used for collection, Meta's Project Aria glasses, integrates eye tracking, front-facing RGB cameras, inertial sensors, and GPS to provide rich data from the human perspective. Unlike many prior egocentric datasets that focus on indoor tasks or exclude eye gaze information, our work emphasizes visual attention while subjects walk in outdoor campus paths. Using this data, we develop EgoCampusNet, a novel method to predict eye gaze of navigating pedestrians as they move through outdoor environments. Our contributions provide both a new resource for studying real-world attention and a resource for future work in gaze prediction models for navigation. Dataset and code will be made publicly available at a later date at https://github.com/ComputerVisionRutgers/EgoCampus .

Smart glasses enhance interactions with the environment by using head-mounted cameras to observe the user's viewpoint, but lack the visual feedback used for common interactions. We introduce Gazeify then Voiceify, a multimodal approach allowing object selection via gaze and voice using displayless smart glasses. Users can select a physical object with their gaze, and the system generates a digital mask and a voice description of the object's semantics. Users can further correct errors through free-form conversation. To demonstrate our approach, we develop an interactive system by integrating advanced object segmentation and detection with a vision-language model. User studies reveal that participants achieve correct gaze selection in 53% of the task trials and use voice disambiguation to correct 58% of the remaining errors. Participants also rated the system as likable, useful, and easy to use.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches within unconstrained images, such as in open-world object detection, represents a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient region recognition architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Through extensive experiments in the context of open-world object recognition, our RegionSpot demonstrates significant performance improvements over prior alternatives, while also providing substantial computational savings. For instance, training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs. Our model outperforms GLIP by 6.5 % in mean average precision (mAP), with an even larger margin by 14.8 % for more challenging and rare categories.

Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally by allocating more visual tokens to the image centers, focusing computation on task-relevant features. Such Active Visual Fixation (AVF) requires carefully coordinated gaze during task execution, which we accomplish hierarchically by first training a low-level gaze servoing policy conditioned on a goal object, then training a target selector which emits fixation goals based on task progress. Both modules are trained with RL on real-world data: the first is trained with a dense geometric reward and the second co-trains with the BC gripper policy which allows it to discover fixation sequences that can resemble a human's fixation sequence while performing the task. EyeRobot 2.0 further takes advantage of fixation by canonicalizing gripper information into a fixation-relative SE(3) frame, which compacts the size of the action distribution to learn. We collect teleoperation data for 7 real-world and 6 simulated tasks, and conduct over 1000 physical and 1800 simulated robot trials comparing EyeRobot 2.0 against passive stereo and ego + wrist camera policies trained on the same data. Removing wrist cameras is costly for standard policies: with only passive stereo, real-world success drops from 52% to 27%. EyeRobot 2.0 closes this gap with only stereo, outperforming passive stereo by 40% in real and 20% in sim. It matches ego + wrist policies when their wrist views are clear (69% vs. 64%), and more than doubles their success when grasped objects occlude the wrist cameras (48% vs. 22%)

Gaze estimation has grown rapidly in accuracy in recent years. However, these models often fail to take advantage of different computer vision (CV) algorithms and techniques (such as small ResNet and Inception networks and ensemble models) that have been shown to improve results for other CV problems. Additionally, most current gaze estimation models require the use of either both eyes or an entire face, whereas real-world data may not always have both eyes in high resolution. Thus, we propose a gaze estimation model that implements the ResNet and Inception model architectures and makes predictions using only one eye image. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble calibration network that uses the predictions from several individual architectures for subject-specific predictions. With the use of lightweight architectures, we achieve high performance on the GazeCapture dataset with very low model parameter counts. When using two eyes as input, we achieve a prediction error of 1.591 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.439 cm with an ensemble calibration model. With just one eye as input, we still achieve an average prediction error of 2.312 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.951 cm with an ensemble calibration model. We also notice significantly lower errors on the right eye images in the test set, which could be important in the design of future gaze estimation-based tools.

Appearance-based gaze estimation (AGE) has achieved remarkable performance in constrained settings, yet we reveal a significant generalization gap where existing AGE models often fail in practical, unconstrained scenarios, particularly those involving facial wearables and poor lighting conditions. We attribute this failure to two core factors: limited image diversity and inconsistent label fidelity across different datasets, especially along the pitch axis. To address these, we propose a robust AGE framework that enhances generalization without requiring additional human-annotated data. First, we expand the image manifold via an ensemble of augmentation techniques, including synthesis of eyeglasses, masks, and varied lighting. Second, to mitigate the impact of anisotropic inter-dataset label deviation, we reformulate gaze regression as a multi-task learning problem, incorporating multi-view supervised contrastive (SupCon) learning, discretized label classification, and eye-region segmentation as auxiliary objectives. To rigorously validate our approach, we curate new benchmark datasets designed to evaluate gaze robustness under challenging conditions, a dimension largely overlooked by existing evaluation protocols. Our MobileNet-based lightweight model achieves generalization performance competitive with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) UniGaze-H, while utilizing less than 1\% of its parameters, enabling high-fidelity, real-time gaze tracking on mobile devices.

Since the beginning of world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, facial masks have been recommended to limit the spread of the disease. However, these masks hide certain facial attributes. Hence, it has become difficult for existing face recognition systems to perform identity verification on masked faces. In this context, it is necessary to develop masked Face Recognition (MFR) for contactless biometric recognition systems. Thus, in this paper, we propose Complementary Attention Learning and Multi-Focal Spatial Attention that precisely removes masked region by training complementary spatial attention to focus on two distinct regions: masked regions and backgrounds. In our method, standard spatial attention and networks focus on unmasked regions, and extract mask-invariant features while minimizing the loss of the conventional Face Recognition (FR) performance. For conventional FR, we evaluate the performance on the IJB-C, Age-DB, CALFW, and CPLFW datasets. We evaluate the MFR performance on the ICCV2021-MFR/Insightface track, and demonstrate the improved performance on the both MFR and FR datasets. Additionally, we empirically verify that spatial attention of proposed method is more precisely activated in unmasked regions.

This paper proposes joint attention estimation in a single image. Different from related work in which only the gaze-related attributes of people are independently employed, (I) their locations and actions are also employed as contextual cues for weighting their attributes, and (ii) interactions among all of these attributes are explicitly modeled in our method. For the interaction modeling, we propose a novel Transformer-based attention network to encode joint attention as low-dimensional features. We introduce a specialized MLP head with positional embedding to the Transformer so that it predicts pixelwise confidence of joint attention for generating the confidence heatmap. This pixelwise prediction improves the heatmap accuracy by avoiding the ill-posed problem in which the high-dimensional heatmap is predicted from the low-dimensional features. The estimated joint attention is further improved by being integrated with general image-based attention estimation. Our method outperforms SOTA methods quantitatively in comparative experiments. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymized_codes-ECA4.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

Urban perception describes how people subjectively evaluate urban environments, shaping how cities are experienced and understood. Existing computational approaches primarily model urban perception directly from street view images, but largely ignore the human perceptual process through which such judgments are formed. In this paper, we introduce Place Pulse-Gaze, an urban perception dataset that augments street view images with synchronized eye-tracking recordings and individual perception labels. Based on this dataset, we propose a Gaze-Guided Urban Perception Framework to study how gaze behavior contributes to the modeling of subjective urban perception. The framework systematically investigates three complementary settings: gaze-only modeling, gaze fusion with explicit semantic scene representations, and gaze fusion with implicit richer visual representations. Experiments show that gaze alone already carries useful predictive signals for subjective urban perception, and that integrating gaze with scene representations further improves prediction under both semantic and richer visual representations. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of incorporating human perceptual processes into urban scene understanding and open a direction for gaze-guided multimodal urban computing.

We present Spatial Region 3D (SR-3D) aware vision-language model that connects single-view 2D images and multi-view 3D data through a shared visual token space. SR-3D supports flexible region prompting, allowing users to annotate regions with bounding boxes, segmentation masks on any frame, or directly in 3D, without the need for exhaustive multi-frame labeling. We achieve this by enriching 2D visual features with 3D positional embeddings, which allows the 3D model to draw upon strong 2D priors for more accurate spatial reasoning across frames, even when objects of interest do not co-occur within the same view. Extensive experiments on both general 2D vision language and specialized 3D spatial benchmarks demonstrate that SR-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness for unifying 2D and 3D representation space on scene understanding. Moreover, we observe applicability to in-the-wild videos without sensory 3D inputs or ground-truth 3D annotations, where SR-3D accurately infers spatial relationships and metric measurements.

In this paper, we present RAG, a Regional-Aware text-to-image Generation method conditioned on regional descriptions for precise layout composition. Regional prompting, or compositional generation, which enables fine-grained spatial control, has gained increasing attention for its practicality in real-world applications. However, previous methods either introduce additional trainable modules, thus only applicable to specific models, or manipulate on score maps within cross-attention layers using attention masks, resulting in limited control strength when the number of regions increases. To handle these limitations, we decouple the multi-region generation into two sub-tasks, the construction of individual region (Regional Hard Binding) that ensures the regional prompt is properly executed, and the overall detail refinement (Regional Soft Refinement) over regions that dismiss the visual boundaries and enhance adjacent interactions. Furthermore, RAG novelly makes repainting feasible, where users can modify specific unsatisfied regions in the last generation while keeping all other regions unchanged, without relying on additional inpainting models. Our approach is tuning-free and applicable to other frameworks as an enhancement to the prompt following property. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that RAG achieves superior performance over attribute binding and object relationship than previous tuning-free methods.

When interacting with objects, humans effectively reason about which regions of objects are viable for an intended action, i.e., the affordance regions of the object. They can also account for subtle differences in object regions based on the task to be performed and whether one or two hands need to be used. However, current vision-based affordance prediction methods often reduce the problem to naive object part segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework for extracting affordance data from human activity video datasets. Our extracted 2HANDS dataset contains precise object affordance region segmentations and affordance class-labels as narrations of the activity performed. The data also accounts for bimanual actions, i.e., two hands co-ordinating and interacting with one or more objects. We present a VLM-based affordance prediction model, 2HandedAfforder, trained on the dataset and demonstrate superior performance over baselines in affordance region segmentation for various activities. Finally, we show that our predicted affordance regions are actionable, i.e., can be used by an agent performing a task, through demonstration in robotic manipulation scenarios.

This paper proposes a new framework to detect, segment, and estimate the localization of the eyes from a periocular Near-Infra-Red iris image under alcohol consumption. The purpose of the system is to measure the fitness for duty. Fitness systems allow us to determine whether a person is physically or psychologically able to perform their tasks. Our framework is based on an object detector trained from scratch to detect both eyes from a single image. Then, two efficient networks were used for semantic segmentation; a Criss-Cross attention network and DenseNet10, with only 122,514 and 210,732 parameters, respectively. These networks can find the pupil, iris, and sclera. In the end, the binary output eye mask is used for pupil and iris diameter estimation with high precision. Five state-of-the-art algorithms were used for this purpose. A mixed proposal reached the best results. A second contribution is establishing an alcohol behavior curve to detect the alcohol presence utilizing a stream of images captured from an iris instance. Also, a manually labeled database with more than 20k images was created. Our best method obtains a mean Intersection-over-Union of 94.54% with DenseNet10 with only 210,732 parameters and an error of only 1-pixel on average.

Human visual reasoning is governed by active vision, a process where metacognitive control drives top-down goal-directed attention, dynamically routing foveal focus toward task-relevant details while maintaining peripheral awareness of the global scene. In contrast, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process visual information passively, relying on the static accumulation of massive token contexts that dilute spatial reasoning and induce linguistic hallucinations. Here we propose the following paradigm shift: GazeVLM, a multimodal architecture that internalizes this metacognitive oversight over its deployment of attention resources directly into the reasoning loop. By empowering the VLM to autonomously generate gaze tokens (<LOOK>), GazeVLM establishes a top-down control mechanism over its own causal attention mask. The model dynamically dictates its focal intent, triggering a continuous suppression bias that dampens irrelevant visual features, implementing spatial selective attention and simulating foveal fixation. Once local reasoning concludes, the bias lifts, seamlessly restoring the global view. This architecture enables the model to fluidly transition between global spatial awareness and localized focal reasoning without relying on external agentic contraptions like cropping tools, or inflating the context window with additional visual tokens derived from localized visual patches. Trained with a bespoke Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) procedure that rewards valid grounding, our 4B-parameter GazeVLM delivers strong high-resolution multimodal reasoning performance, surpassing state-of-the-art VLMs in its parameter class by nearly 4% and agentic multimodal pipelines built around thinking with images by more than 5% on HRBench-4k and HRBench-8k.

Eye movements during reading offer insights into both the reader's cognitive processes and the characteristics of the text that is being read. Hence, the analysis of scanpaths in reading have attracted increasing attention across fields, ranging from cognitive science over linguistics to computer science. In particular, eye-tracking-while-reading data has been argued to bear the potential to make machine-learning-based language models exhibit a more human-like linguistic behavior. However, one of the main challenges in modeling human scanpaths in reading is their dual-sequence nature: the words are ordered following the grammatical rules of the language, whereas the fixations are chronologically ordered. As humans do not strictly read from left-to-right, but rather skip or refixate words and regress to previous words, the alignment of the linguistic and the temporal sequence is non-trivial. In this paper, we develop Eyettention, the first dual-sequence model that simultaneously processes the sequence of words and the chronological sequence of fixations. The alignment of the two sequences is achieved by a cross-sequence attention mechanism. We show that Eyettention outperforms state-of-the-art models in predicting scanpaths. We provide an extensive within- and across-data set evaluation on different languages. An ablation study and qualitative analysis support an in-depth understanding of the model's behavior.

This paper reviews the Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction at AIM 2024. The goal of the participants was to develop a method for predicting accurate saliency maps for the provided set of video sequences. Saliency maps are widely exploited in various applications, including video compression, quality assessment, visual perception studies, the advertising industry, etc. For this competition, a previously unused large-scale audio-visual mouse saliency (AViMoS) dataset of 1500 videos with more than 70 observers per video was collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking. The dataset collection methodology has been validated using conventional eye-tracking data and has shown high consistency. Over 30 teams registered in the challenge, and there are 7 teams that submitted the results in the final phase. The final phase solutions were tested and ranked by commonly used quality metrics on a private test subset. The results of this evaluation and the descriptions of the solutions are presented in this report. All data, including the private test subset, is made publicly available on the challenge homepage - https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/video-saliency-prediction.html.

In this letter, we propose a new method, Multi-Clue Gaze (MCGaze), to facilitate video gaze estimation via capturing spatial-temporal interaction context among head, face, and eye in an end-to-end learning way, which has not been well concerned yet. The main advantage of MCGaze is that the tasks of clue localization of head, face, and eye can be solved jointly for gaze estimation in a one-step way, with joint optimization to seek optimal performance. During this, spatial-temporal context exchange happens among the clues on the head, face, and eye. Accordingly, the final gazes obtained by fusing features from various queries can be aware of global clues from heads and faces, and local clues from eyes simultaneously, which essentially leverages performance. Meanwhile, the one-step running way also ensures high running efficiency. Experiments on the challenging Gaze360 dataset verify the superiority of our proposition. The source code will be released at https://github.com/zgchen33/MCGaze.

Diffusion models have demonstrated excellent capabilities in text-to-image generation. Their semantic understanding (i.e., prompt following) ability has also been greatly improved with large language models (e.g., T5, Llama). However, existing models cannot perfectly handle long and complex text prompts, especially when the text prompts contain various objects with numerous attributes and interrelated spatial relationships. While many regional prompting methods have been proposed for UNet-based models (SD1.5, SDXL), but there are still no implementations based on the recent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, such as SD3 and FLUX.1.In this report, we propose and implement regional prompting for FLUX.1 based on attention manipulation, which enables DiT with fined-grained compositional text-to-image generation capability in a training-free manner. Code is available at https://github.com/antonioo-c/Regional-Prompting-FLUX.

We address the task of jointly determining what a person is doing and where they are looking based on the analysis of video captured by a headworn camera. To facilitate our research, we first introduce the EGTEA Gaze+ dataset. Our dataset comes with videos, gaze tracking data, hand masks and action annotations, thereby providing the most comprehensive benchmark for First Person Vision (FPV). Moving beyond the dataset, we propose a novel deep model for joint gaze estimation and action recognition in FPV. Our method describes the participant's gaze as a probabilistic variable and models its distribution using stochastic units in a deep network. We further sample from these stochastic units, generating an attention map to guide the aggregation of visual features for action recognition. Our method is evaluated on our EGTEA Gaze+ dataset and achieves a performance level that exceeds the state-of-the-art by a significant margin. More importantly, we demonstrate that our model can be applied to larger scale FPV dataset---EPIC-Kitchens even without using gaze, offering new state-of-the-art results on FPV action recognition.

Can human reading comprehension be assessed from eye movements in reading? In this work, we address this longstanding question using large-scale eyetracking data over textual materials that are geared towards behavioral analyses of reading comprehension. We focus on a fine-grained and largely unaddressed task of predicting reading comprehension from eye movements at the level of a single question over a passage. We tackle this task using three new multimodal language models, as well as a battery of prior models from the literature. We evaluate the models' ability to generalize to new textual items, new participants, and the combination of both, in two different reading regimes, ordinary reading and information seeking. The evaluations suggest that although the task is highly challenging, eye movements contain useful signals for fine-grained prediction of reading comprehension. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Gaze-referential inference--the ability to infer what others are looking at--is a critical component of a theory of mind that underpins natural human-AI interaction. In a controlled study, we evaluated this skill across 111 Vision Language Models (VLMs) using photos taken with manipulated difficulty and variability, comparing performance with that of human participants (N = 65), and analyzed behaviors using mixed-effects models. We found that 94 of the 111 VLMs failed to do better than random guessing, while humans achieved near-ceiling accuracy. VLMs even respond with each choice almost equally frequently. Are they randomly guessing? Although most VLMs struggle, when we zoom in on five of the top-tier VLMs with above-chance performance, we find that their performance declined with increasing task difficulty but varied only slightly across different prompts and scene objects. These behavioral features cannot be explained by considering them as random guessers. Instead, they likely use a combination of heuristics and guessing such that their performance is subject to the task difficulty but robust to perceptual variations. This suggests that VLMs, lacking gaze inference capability, have yet to become technologies that can naturally interact with humans, but the potential remains.

We introduce a novel Dual Input Stream Transformer (DIST) for the challenging problem of assigning fixation points from eye-tracking data collected during passage reading to the line of text that the reader was actually focused on. This post-processing step is crucial for analysis of the reading data due to the presence of noise in the form of vertical drift. We evaluate DIST against nine classical approaches on a comprehensive suite of nine diverse datasets, and demonstrate DIST's superiority. By combining multiple instances of the DIST model in an ensemble we achieve an average accuracy of 98.5\% across all datasets. Our approach presents a significant step towards addressing the bottleneck of manual line assignment in reading research. Through extensive model analysis and ablation studies, we identify key factors that contribute to DIST's success, including the incorporation of line overlap features and the use of a second input stream. Through evaluation on a set of diverse datasets we demonstrate that DIST is robust to various experimental setups, making it a safe first choice for practitioners in the field.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction. The goal of the challenge participants was to develop automatic saliency map prediction methods for the provided video sequences. The novel dataset of 2,000 diverse videos with an open license was prepared for this challenge. The fixations and corresponding saliency maps were collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking and contain viewing data from over 5,000 assessors. Evaluation was performed on a subset of 800 test videos using generally accepted quality metrics. The challenge attracted over 20 teams making submissions, and 7 teams passed the final phase with code review. All data used in this challenge is made publicly available - https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE26_Saliency_Prediction.

When reading, we often have specific information that interests us in a text. For example, you might be reading this paper because you are curious about LLMs for eye movements in reading, the experimental design, or perhaps you only care about the question ``but does it work?''. More broadly, in daily life, people approach texts with any number of text-specific goals that guide their reading behavior. In this work, we ask, for the first time, whether open-ended reading goals can be automatically decoded from eye movements in reading. To address this question, we introduce goal classification and goal reconstruction tasks and evaluation frameworks, and use large-scale eye tracking for reading data in English with hundreds of text-specific information seeking tasks. We develop and compare several discriminative and generative multimodal LLMs that combine eye movements and text for goal classification and goal reconstruction. Our experiments show considerable success on both tasks, suggesting that LLMs can extract valuable information about the readers' text-specific goals from eye movements.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved video generation and editing capabilities. However, multi-grained video editing, which encompasses class-level, instance-level, and part-level modifications, remains a formidable challenge. The major difficulties in multi-grained editing include semantic misalignment of text-to-region control and feature coupling within the diffusion model. To address these difficulties, we present VideoGrain, a zero-shot approach that modulates space-time (cross- and self-) attention mechanisms to achieve fine-grained control over video content. We enhance text-to-region control by amplifying each local prompt's attention to its corresponding spatial-disentangled region while minimizing interactions with irrelevant areas in cross-attention. Additionally, we improve feature separation by increasing intra-region awareness and reducing inter-region interference in self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in real-world scenarios. Our code, data, and demos are available at https://knightyxp.github.io/VideoGrain_project_page/

Recent joint embedding-based self-supervised methods have surpassed standard supervised approaches on various image recognition tasks such as image classification. These self-supervised methods aim at maximizing agreement between features extracted from two differently transformed views of the same image, which results in learning an invariant representation with respect to appearance and geometric image transformations. However, the effectiveness of these approaches remains unclear in the context of gaze estimation, a structured regression task that requires equivariance under geometric transformations (e.g., rotations, horizontal flip). In this work, we propose SwAT, an equivariant version of the online clustering-based self-supervised approach SwAV, to learn more informative representations for gaze estimation. We demonstrate that SwAT, with ResNet-50 and supported with uncurated unlabeled face images, outperforms state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods and supervised baselines in various experiments. In particular, we achieve up to 57% and 25% improvements in cross-dataset and within-dataset evaluation tasks on existing benchmarks (ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, and MPIIFaceGaze).

In this study, we present TURead, an eye movement dataset of silent and oral sentence reading in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography understudied in reading research. TURead provides empirical data to investigate the relationship between morphology and oculomotor control. We employ a target-word approach in which target words are manipulated by word length and by the addition of two commonly used suffixes in Turkish. The dataset contains well-established eye movement variables; prelexical characteristics such as vowel harmony and bigram-trigram frequencies and word features, such as word length, predictability, frequency, eye voice span measures, Cloze test scores of the root word and suffix predictabilities, as well as the scores obtained from two working memory tests. Our findings on fixation parameters and word characteristics are in line with the patterns reported in the relevant literature.

Instruction tuning large language model (LLM) on image-text pairs has achieved unprecedented vision-language multimodal abilities. However, their vision-language alignments are only built on image-level, the lack of region-level alignment limits their advancements to fine-grained multimodal understanding. In this paper, we propose instruction tuning on region-of-interest. The key design is to reformulate the bounding box as the format of spatial instruction. The interleaved sequences of visual features extracted by the spatial instruction and the language embedding are input to LLM, and trained on the transformed region-text data in instruction tuning format. Our region-level vision-language model, termed as GPT4RoI, brings brand new conversational and interactive experience beyond image-level understanding. (1) Controllability: Users can interact with our model by both language and spatial instructions to flexibly adjust the detail level of the question. (2) Capacities: Our model supports not only single-region spatial instruction but also multi-region. This unlocks more region-level multimodal capacities such as detailed region caption and complex region reasoning. (3) Composition: Any off-the-shelf object detector can be a spatial instruction provider so as to mine informative object attributes from our model, like color, shape, material, action, relation to other objects, etc. The code, data, and demo can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/GPT4RoI.

Human gaze is a crucial cue used in various applications such as human-robot interaction and virtual reality. Recently, convolution neural network (CNN) approaches have made notable progress in predicting gaze direction. However, estimating gaze in-the-wild is still a challenging problem due to the uniqueness of eye appearance, lightning conditions, and the diversity of head pose and gaze directions. In this paper, we propose a robust CNN-based model for predicting gaze in unconstrained settings. We propose to regress each gaze angle separately to improve the per-angel prediction accuracy, which will enhance the overall gaze performance. In addition, we use two identical losses, one for each angle, to improve network learning and increase its generalization. We evaluate our model with two popular datasets collected with unconstrained settings. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 3.92{\deg} and 10.41{\deg} on MPIIGaze and Gaze360 datasets, respectively. We make our code open source at https://github.com/Ahmednull/L2CS-Net.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63% accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.