new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Oct 7

FG-CXR: A Radiologist-Aligned Gaze Dataset for Enhancing Interpretability in Chest X-Ray Report Generation

Developing an interpretable system for generating reports in chest X-ray (CXR) analysis is becoming increasingly crucial in Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, enabling radiologists to comprehend the decisions made by these systems. Despite the growth of diverse datasets and methods focusing on report generation, there remains a notable gap in how closely these models' generated reports align with the interpretations of real radiologists. In this study, we tackle this challenge by initially introducing Fine-Grained CXR (FG-CXR) dataset, which provides fine-grained paired information between the captions generated by radiologists and the corresponding gaze attention heatmaps for each anatomy. Unlike existing datasets that include a raw sequence of gaze alongside a report, with significant misalignment between gaze location and report content, our FG-CXR dataset offers a more grained alignment between gaze attention and diagnosis transcript. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that simply applying black-box image captioning methods to generate reports cannot adequately explain which information in CXR is utilized and how long needs to attend to accurately generate reports. Consequently, we propose a novel explainable radiologist's attention generator network (Gen-XAI) that mimics the diagnosis process of radiologists, explicitly constraining its output to closely align with both radiologist's gaze attention and transcript. Finally, we perform extensive experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of our method. Our datasets and checkpoint is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/FG-CXR.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

MPIIGaze: Real-World Dataset and Deep Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 23, 2017

ChildPlay: A New Benchmark for Understanding Children's Gaze Behaviour

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 4, 2023

SAGE: Synchronized Action-Gaze Recognition and Anticipation for Human Behavior Understanding

Human object interaction (HOI), gaze pattern, and their anticipation are intricately linked, providing valuable insights into cognitive processes, intentions, and behavior. However, most existing models handle gaze and actions separately, missing both their interdependence and the advantages of a unified solution. This paper presents a novel unified framework, SAGE (Synchronized Action-GazE), which integrates simultaneous recognition and anticipation of both HOI and human gaze into a single unified end-to-end trainable model. Our approach leverages a transformer-based architecture and incorporates gaze data into spatiotemporal attention mechanisms to simultaneously predict current and future human actions and gaze behavior. We explore this bidirectional relationship between gaze and actions under different scenarios, whether requiring a close-up, detailed view (egocentric) or a wider, more contextual view (exocentric), making our framework versatile for various applications. Additionally, due to lack of datasets for comprehensive analysis of both HOI and gaze in exocentric videos, we establish a new benchmark Exo-Cook to facilitate further research in this domain. Experiments on three benchmark datasets: VidHOI, EGTEA Gaze+, and Exo-Cook show that jointly modeling gaze and actions across current and future frames achieves consistently strong results, often surpassing specialized state-of-the-art models tailored to individual tasks. By unifying actions and attention in a comprehensive way, our work lays the groundwork for more intuitive human-machine interaction.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 3

RecGaze: The First Eye Tracking and User Interaction Dataset for Carousel Interfaces

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

Leveraging Driver Field-of-View for Multimodal Ego-Trajectory Prediction

Understanding drivers' decision-making is crucial for road safety. Although predicting the ego-vehicle's path is valuable for driver-assistance systems, existing methods mainly focus on external factors like other vehicles' motions, often neglecting the driver's attention and intent. To address this gap, we infer the ego-trajectory by integrating the driver's gaze and the surrounding scene. We introduce RouteFormer, a novel multimodal ego-trajectory prediction network combining GPS data, environmental context, and the driver's field-of-view, comprising first-person video and gaze fixations. We also present the Path Complexity Index (PCI), a new metric for trajectory complexity that enables a more nuanced evaluation of challenging scenarios. To tackle data scarcity and enhance diversity, we introduce GEM, a comprehensive dataset of urban driving scenarios enriched with synchronized driver field-of-view and gaze data. Extensive evaluations on GEM and DR(eye)VE demonstrate that RouteFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in prediction accuracy across diverse conditions. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating driver field-of-view data yields significantly better average displacement error, especially in challenging scenarios with high PCI scores, underscoring the importance of modeling driver attention. All data and code are available at https://meakbiyik.github.io/routeformer.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

Egocentric Event-Based Vision for Ping Pong Ball Trajectory Prediction

In this paper, we present a real-time egocentric trajectory prediction system for table tennis using event cameras. Unlike standard cameras, which suffer from high latency and motion blur at fast ball speeds, event cameras provide higher temporal resolution, allowing more frequent state updates, greater robustness to outliers, and accurate trajectory predictions using just a short time window after the opponent's impact. We collect a dataset of ping-pong game sequences, including 3D ground-truth trajectories of the ball, synchronized with sensor data from the Meta Project Aria glasses and event streams. Our system leverages foveated vision, using eye-gaze data from the glasses to process only events in the viewer's fovea. This biologically inspired approach improves ball detection performance and significantly reduces computational latency, as it efficiently allocates resources to the most perceptually relevant regions, achieving a reduction factor of 10.81 on the collected trajectories. Our detection pipeline has a worst-case total latency of 4.5 ms, including computation and perception - significantly lower than a frame-based 30 FPS system, which, in the worst case, takes 66 ms solely for perception. Finally, we fit a trajectory prediction model to the estimated states of the ball, enabling 3D trajectory forecasting in the future. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to predict table tennis trajectories from an egocentric perspective using event cameras.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 8, 2025

EgoViT: Pyramid Video Transformer for Egocentric Action Recognition

Capturing interaction of hands with objects is important to autonomously detect human actions from egocentric videos. In this work, we present a pyramid video transformer with a dynamic class token generator for egocentric action recognition. Different from previous video transformers, which use the same static embedding as the class token for diverse inputs, we propose a dynamic class token generator that produces a class token for each input video by analyzing the hand-object interaction and the related motion information. The dynamic class token can diffuse such information to the entire model by communicating with other informative tokens in the subsequent transformer layers. With the dynamic class token, dissimilarity between videos can be more prominent, which helps the model distinguish various inputs. In addition, traditional video transformers explore temporal features globally, which requires large amounts of computation. However, egocentric videos often have a large amount of background scene transition, which causes discontinuities across distant frames. In this case, blindly reducing the temporal sampling rate will risk losing crucial information. Hence, we also propose a pyramid architecture to hierarchically process the video from short-term high rate to long-term low rate. With the proposed architecture, we significantly reduce the computational cost as well as the memory requirement without sacrificing from the model performance. We perform comparisons with different baseline video transformers on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA Gaze+ datasets. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that the proposed model can efficiently improve the performance for egocentric action recognition.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

I-AI: A Controllable & Interpretable AI System for Decoding Radiologists' Intense Focus for Accurate CXR Diagnoses

In the field of chest X-ray (CXR) diagnosis, existing works often focus solely on determining where a radiologist looks, typically through tasks such as detection, segmentation, or classification. However, these approaches are often designed as black-box models, lacking interpretability. In this paper, we introduce Interpretable Artificial Intelligence (I-AI) a novel and unified controllable interpretable pipeline for decoding the intense focus of radiologists in CXR diagnosis. Our I-AI addresses three key questions: where a radiologist looks, how long they focus on specific areas, and what findings they diagnose. By capturing the intensity of the radiologist's gaze, we provide a unified solution that offers insights into the cognitive process underlying radiological interpretation. Unlike current methods that rely on black-box machine learning models, which can be prone to extracting erroneous information from the entire input image during the diagnosis process, we tackle this issue by effectively masking out irrelevant information. Our proposed I-AI leverages a vision-language model, allowing for precise control over the interpretation process while ensuring the exclusion of irrelevant features. To train our I-AI model, we utilize an eye gaze dataset to extract anatomical gaze information and generate ground truth heatmaps. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method. We showcase that the attention heatmaps, designed to mimic radiologists' focus, encode sufficient and relevant information, enabling accurate classification tasks using only a portion of CXR. The code, checkpoints, and data are at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/IAI

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

Modeling Eye Gaze Velocity Trajectories using GANs with Spectral Loss for Enhanced Fidelity

Accurate modeling of eye gaze dynamics is essential for advancement in human-computer interaction, neurological diagnostics, and cognitive research. Traditional generative models like Markov models often fail to capture the complex temporal dependencies and distributional nuance inherent in eye gaze trajectories data. This study introduces a GAN framework employing LSTM and CNN generators and discriminators to generate high-fidelity synthetic eye gaze velocity trajectories. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of four GAN architectures: CNN-CNN, LSTM-CNN, CNN-LSTM, and LSTM-LSTM trained under two conditions: using only adversarial loss and using a weighted combination of adversarial and spectral losses. Our findings reveal that the LSTM-CNN architecture trained with this new loss function exhibits the closest alignment to the real data distribution, effectively capturing both the distribution tails and the intricate temporal dependencies. The inclusion of spectral regularization significantly enhances the GANs ability to replicate the spectral characteristics of eye gaze movements, leading to a more stable learning process and improved data fidelity. Comparative analysis with an HMM optimized to four hidden states further highlights the advantages of the LSTM-CNN GAN. Statistical metrics show that the HMM-generated data significantly diverges from the real data in terms of mean, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. In contrast, the LSTM-CNN model closely matches the real data across these statistics, affirming its capacity to model the complexity of eye gaze dynamics effectively. These results position the spectrally regularized LSTM-CNN GAN as a robust tool for generating synthetic eye gaze velocity data with high fidelity.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Towards Pixel-Level Prediction for Gaze Following: Benchmark and Approach

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.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024

Gaze Target Estimation Anywhere with Concepts

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.

google Google
·
Aug 10 2

GazeVaLM: A Multi-Observer Eye-Tracking Benchmark for Evaluating Clinical Realism in AI-Generated X-Rays

We introduce GazeVaLM, a public eye-tracking dataset for studying clinical perception during chest radiograph authenticity assessment. The dataset comprises 960 gaze recordings from 16 expert radiologists interpreting 30 real and 30 synthetic chest X-rays (generated by diffusion based generative AI) under two conditions: diagnostic assessment and real-fake classification (Visual Turing test). For each image-observer pair, we provide raw gaze samples, fixation maps, scanpaths, saliency density maps, structured diagnostic labels, and authenticity judgments. We extend the protocol to 6 state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs, releasing their predicted diagnoses, authenticity labels, and confidence scores under matched conditions - enabling direct human-AI comparison at both decision and uncertainty levels. We further provide analyses of gaze agreement, inter-observer consistency, and benchmarking of radiologists versus LLMs in diagnostic accuracy and authenticity detection. GazeVaLM supports research in gaze modeling, clinical decision-making, human-AI comparison, generative image realism assessment, and uncertainty quantification. By jointly releasing visual attention data, clinical labels, and model predictions, we aim to facilitate reproducible research on how experts and AI systems perceive, interpret, and evaluate medical images. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/davidcwong/GazeVaLM.

  • 25 authors
·
Apr 12

GazeGen: Gaze-Driven User Interaction for Visual Content Generation

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024 2

DiffEye: Diffusion-Based Continuous Eye-Tracking Data Generation Conditioned on Natural Images

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/

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025

OAT: Object-Level Attention Transformer for Gaze Scanpath Prediction

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

Domain-Adaptive Full-Face Gaze Estimation via Novel-View-Synthesis and Feature Disentanglement

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.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25, 2023

DeepGaze3.5-VL: Modeling Scanpaths via Autoregressive Token Prediction

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 1

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

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/

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 11

Scene Text Detection and Recognition "in light of" Challenging Environmental Conditions using Aria Glasses Egocentric Vision Cameras

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.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 21, 2025

One Eye is All You Need: Lightweight Ensembles for Gaze Estimation with Single Encoders

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.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2022

Real-time Appearance-based Gaze Estimation for Open Domains

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 26

StreamGaze: Gaze-Guided Temporal Reasoning and Proactive Understanding in Streaming Videos

Streaming video understanding requires models not only to process temporally incoming frames, but also to anticipate user intention for realistic applications like AR glasses. While prior streaming benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning, none measure whether MLLMs can interpret or leverage human gaze signals within a streaming setting. To fill this gap, we introduce StreamGaze, the first benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively MLLMs use gaze for temporal and proactive reasoning in streaming videos. StreamGaze introduces gaze-guided past, present, and proactive tasks that comprehensively evaluate streaming video understanding. These tasks assess whether models can use real-time gaze to follow shifting attention and infer user intentions from only past and currently observed frames. To build StreamGaze, we develop a gaze-video QA generation pipeline that aligns egocentric videos with raw gaze trajectories via fixation extraction, region-specific visual prompting, and scanpath construction. This pipeline produces spatio-temporally grounded QA pairs that closely reflect human perceptual dynamics. Across all StreamGaze tasks, we observe substantial performance gaps between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in gaze-based temporal reasoning, intention modeling, and proactive prediction. We further provide detailed analyses of gaze-prompting strategies, reasoning behaviors, and task-specific failure modes, offering deeper insight into why current MLLMs struggle and what capabilities future models must develop. All data and code will be publicly released to support continued research in gaze-guided streaming video understanding.

adobe-research Adobe Research
·
Dec 1, 2025 2

Unveiling the Truth: Exploring Human Gaze Patterns in Fake Images

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Glance-or-Gaze: Incentivizing LMMs to Adaptively Focus Search via Reinforcement Learning

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.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20

EyeRobot 2.0: Active Gaze for Precise Manipulation without Wrist Cameras

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%)

EgoSurgery-Phase: A Dataset of Surgical Phase Recognition from Egocentric Open Surgery Videos

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Gaze Beyond the Frame: Forecasting Egocentric 3D Visual Span

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 22, 2025

Emotional Conversation: Empowering Talking Faces with Cohesive Expression, Gaze and Pose Generation

Vivid talking face generation holds immense potential applications across diverse multimedia domains, such as film and game production. While existing methods accurately synchronize lip movements with input audio, they typically ignore crucial alignments between emotion and facial cues, which include expression, gaze, and head pose. These alignments are indispensable for synthesizing realistic videos. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage audio-driven talking face generation framework that employs 3D facial landmarks as intermediate variables. This framework achieves collaborative alignment of expression, gaze, and pose with emotions through self-supervised learning. Specifically, we decompose this task into two key steps, namely speech-to-landmarks synthesis and landmarks-to-face generation. The first step focuses on simultaneously synthesizing emotionally aligned facial cues, including normalized landmarks that represent expressions, gaze, and head pose. These cues are subsequently reassembled into relocated facial landmarks. In the second step, these relocated landmarks are mapped to latent key points using self-supervised learning and then input into a pretrained model to create high-quality face images. Extensive experiments on the MEAD dataset demonstrate that our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and emotional alignment.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024

MOTOR: A Multimodal Dataset for Two-Wheeler Rider Behavior Understanding

Two-wheelers account for a disproportionately high share of road fatalities in the Global South. Research on two-wheeler rider behavior, however, lags far behind four-wheelers, where multimodal datasets have driven major advances in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). To address this gap, we present the MOtorized TwO-wheeler Rider (MOTOR) dataset, the first large-scale, multi-view, multimodal resource dedicated to two-wheelers in dense, unstructured traffic. MOTOR comprises 1,629 sequences (25+ hours of video data) collected from 16 riders and integrates synchronized front, rear, and helmet videos, rider eye-gaze from wearable trackers, on-road audio, and telemetry (GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope). Rich annotations capture traffic context, rider state, 12 riding maneuvers spanning conventional and unconventional behaviors, and legality labels (Legal, Illegal, Unspecified). We benchmark rider behavior recognition and maneuver legality classification using state-of-the-art video action recognition backbones (CNN and Transformer-based), extended with multimodal fusion, and find that combining RGB, gaze, and telemetry consistently yields the best performance. MOTOR thus provides a unique foundation for advancing safety-critical understanding of two-wheeler riding. It offers the research community a benchmark to develop and evaluate models for behavior analysis, legality-aware prediction, and intelligent transportation systems. Dataset and code is available at https: //varuniiith.github.io/MOTOR-Dataset/

  • 3 authors
·
May 20

EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30: Densely annotated cooking dataset with 3D kinematics to challenge video and language models

Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to cleaning. Here, we introduce the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset, collected in a noninvasive motion capture platform inside a kitchen environment. Nine static RGB-D cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and one head-mounted HoloLens~2 headset were used to capture 3D hand, body, and eye movements. The EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset is a multi-view action dataset with synchronized exocentric, egocentric, depth, IMUs, eye gaze, body and hand kinematics spanning 29.7 hours of 16 subjects cooking four different recipes. Action sequences were densely annotated with 33.78 action segments per minute. Leveraging this multi-modal dataset, we propose four benchmarks to advance behavior understanding and modeling through 1) a vision-language benchmark, 2) a semantic text-to-motion generation benchmark, 3) a multi-modal action recognition benchmark, 4) a pose-based action segmentation benchmark. We expect the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset to pave the way for better methods as well as insights to understand the nature of ecologically-valid human behavior. Code and data are available at https://github.com/amathislab/EPFL-Smart-Kitchen

amathislab Mathis Group @ EPFL
·
Jun 2, 2025

I-MPN: Inductive Message Passing Network for Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Annotation of Mobile Eye Tracking Data

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024