Daily Papers

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.

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.

Although appearance-based point-of-gaze (PoG) estimation has improved, the estimators still struggle to generalize across individuals due to personal differences. Therefore, person-specific calibration is required for accurate PoG estimation. However, calibrated PoG estimators are often sensitive to head pose variations. To address this, we investigate the key factors influencing calibrated estimators and explore pose-robust calibration strategies. Specifically, we first construct a benchmark, MobilePoG, which includes facial images from 32 individuals focusing on designated points under either fixed or continuously changing head poses. Using this benchmark, we systematically analyze how the diversity of calibration points and head poses influences estimation accuracy. Our experiments show that introducing a wider range of head poses during calibration improves the estimator's ability to handle pose variation. Building on this insight, we propose a dynamic calibration strategy in which users fixate on calibration points while moving their phones. This strategy naturally introduces head pose variation during a user-friendly and efficient calibration process, ultimately producing a better calibrated PoG estimator that is less sensitive to head pose variations than those using conventional calibration strategies. Codes and datasets are available at our project page.

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 .

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite decades of research on data collection and model architectures, current gaze estimation models encounter significant challenges in generalizing across diverse data domains. Recent advances in self-supervised pre-training have shown remarkable performances in generalization across various vision tasks. However, their effectiveness in gaze estimation remains unexplored. We propose UniGaze, for the first time, leveraging large-scale in-the-wild facial datasets for gaze estimation through self-supervised pre-training. Through systematic investigation, we clarify critical factors that are essential for effective pretraining in gaze estimation. Our experiments reveal that self-supervised approaches designed for semantic tasks fail when applied to gaze estimation, while our carefully designed pre-training pipeline consistently improves cross-domain performance. Through comprehensive experiments of challenging cross-dataset evaluation and novel protocols including leave-one-dataset-out and joint-dataset settings, we demonstrate that UniGaze significantly improves generalization across multiple data domains while minimizing reliance on costly labeled data. source code and model are available at https://github.com/ut-vision/UniGaze.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Gaze estimation methods estimate gaze from facial appearance with a single camera. However, due to the limited view of a single camera, the captured facial appearance cannot provide complete facial information and thus complicate the gaze estimation problem. Recently, camera devices are rapidly updated. Dual cameras are affordable for users and have been integrated in many devices. This development suggests that we can further improve gaze estimation performance with dual-view gaze estimation. In this paper, we propose a dual-view gaze estimation network (DV-Gaze). DV-Gaze estimates dual-view gaze directions from a pair of images. We first propose a dual-view interactive convolution (DIC) block in DV-Gaze. DIC blocks exchange dual-view information during convolution in multiple feature scales. It fuses dual-view features along epipolar lines and compensates for the original feature with the fused feature. We further propose a dual-view transformer to estimate gaze from dual-view features. Camera poses are encoded to indicate the position information in the transformer. We also consider the geometric relation between dual-view gaze directions and propose a dual-view gaze consistency loss for DV-Gaze. DV-Gaze achieves state-of-the-art performance on ETH-XGaze and EVE datasets. Our experiments also prove the potential of dual-view gaze estimation. We release codes in https://github.com/yihuacheng/DVGaze.

In urban or crowded environments, humans rely on eye contact for fast and efficient communication with nearby people. Autonomous agents also need to detect eye contact to interact with pedestrians and safely navigate around them. In this paper, we focus on eye contact detection in the wild, i.e., real-world scenarios for autonomous vehicles with no control over the environment or the distance of pedestrians. We introduce a model that leverages semantic keypoints to detect eye contact and show that this high-level representation (i) achieves state-of-the-art results on the publicly-available dataset JAAD, and (ii) conveys better generalization properties than leveraging raw images in an end-to-end network. To study domain adaptation, we create LOOK: a large-scale dataset for eye contact detection in the wild, which focuses on diverse and unconstrained scenarios for real-world generalization. The source code and the LOOK dataset are publicly shared towards an open science mission.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

Deep saliency prediction algorithms complement the object recognition features, they typically rely on additional information, such as scene context, semantic relationships, gaze direction, and object dissimilarity. However, none of these models consider the temporal nature of gaze shifts during image observation. We introduce a novel saliency prediction model that learns to output saliency maps in sequential time intervals by exploiting human temporal attention patterns. Our approach locally modulates the saliency predictions by combining the learned temporal maps. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models, including a multi-duration saliency model, on the SALICON benchmark. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.

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 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.

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.

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.

From scientific research to commercial applications, eye tracking is an important tool across many domains. Despite its range of applications, eye tracking has yet to become a pervasive technology. We believe that we can put the power of eye tracking in everyone's palm by building eye tracking software that works on commodity hardware such as mobile phones and tablets, without the need for additional sensors or devices. We tackle this problem by introducing GazeCapture, the first large-scale dataset for eye tracking, containing data from over 1450 people consisting of almost 2.5M frames. Using GazeCapture, we train iTracker, a convolutional neural network for eye tracking, which achieves a significant reduction in error over previous approaches while running in real time (10-15fps) on a modern mobile device. Our model achieves a prediction error of 1.71cm and 2.53cm without calibration on mobile phones and tablets respectively. With calibration, this is reduced to 1.34cm and 2.12cm. Further, we demonstrate that the features learned by iTracker generalize well to other datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results. The code, data, and models are available at http://gazecapture.csail.mit.edu.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

Top-performing landmark estimation algorithms are based on exploiting the excellent ability of large convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to represent local appearance. However, it is well known that they can only learn weak spatial relationships. To address this problem, we propose a model based on the combination of a CNN with a cascade of Graph Attention Network regressors. To this end, we introduce an encoding that jointly represents the appearance and location of facial landmarks and an attention mechanism to weigh the information according to its reliability. This is combined with a multi-task approach to initialize the location of graph nodes and a coarse-to-fine landmark description scheme. Our experiments confirm that the proposed model learns a global representation of the structure of the face, achieving top performance in popular benchmarks on head pose and landmark estimation. The improvement provided by our model is most significant in situations involving large changes in the local appearance of landmarks.

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.

The emergence of advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has significantly enhanced AI assistants' ability to process complex information across modalities. Recently, egocentric videos, by directly capturing user focus, actions, and context in an unified coordinate, offer an exciting opportunity to enable proactive and personalized AI user experiences with MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks overlook the crucial role of gaze as an indicator of user intent. To address this gap, we introduce EgoGazeVQA, an egocentric gaze-guided video question answering benchmark that leverages gaze information to improve the understanding of longer daily-life videos. EgoGazeVQA consists of gaze-based QA pairs generated by MLLMs and refined by human annotators. Our experiments reveal that existing MLLMs struggle to accurately interpret user intentions. In contrast, our gaze-guided intent prompting methods significantly enhance performance by integrating spatial, temporal, and intent-related cues. We further conduct experiments on gaze-related fine-tuning and analyze how gaze estimation accuracy impacts prompting effectiveness. These results underscore the value of gaze for more personalized and effective AI assistants in egocentric settings. Project page: https://taiyi98.github.io/projects/EgoGazeVQA

We present Attention Mesh, a lightweight architecture for 3D face mesh prediction that uses attention to semantically meaningful regions. Our neural network is designed for real-time on-device inference and runs at over 50 FPS on a Pixel 2 phone. Our solution enables applications like AR makeup, eye tracking and AR puppeteering that rely on highly accurate landmarks for eye and lips regions. Our main contribution is a unified network architecture that achieves the same accuracy on facial landmarks as a multi-stage cascaded approach, while being 30 percent faster.

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.

Grounded situation recognition is the task of predicting the main activity, entities playing certain roles within the activity, and bounding-box groundings of the entities in the given image. To effectively deal with this challenging task, we introduce a novel approach where the two processes for activity classification and entity estimation are interactive and complementary. To implement this idea, we propose Collaborative Glance-Gaze TransFormer (CoFormer) that consists of two modules: Glance transformer for activity classification and Gaze transformer for entity estimation. Glance transformer predicts the main activity with the help of Gaze transformer that analyzes entities and their relations, while Gaze transformer estimates the grounded entities by focusing only on the entities relevant to the activity predicted by Glance transformer. Our CoFormer achieves the state of the art in all evaluation metrics on the SWiG dataset. Training code and model weights are available at https://github.com/jhcho99/CoFormer.

In a typical video conferencing setup, it is hard to maintain eye contact during a call since it requires looking into the camera rather than the display. We propose an eye contact correction model that restores the eye contact regardless of the relative position of the camera and display. Unlike previous solutions, our model redirects the gaze from an arbitrary direction to the center without requiring a redirection angle or camera/display/user geometry as inputs. We use a deep convolutional neural network that inputs a monocular image and produces a vector field and a brightness map to correct the gaze. We train this model in a bi-directional way on a large set of synthetically generated photorealistic images with perfect labels. The learned model is a robust eye contact corrector which also predicts the input gaze implicitly at no additional cost. Our system is primarily designed to improve the quality of video conferencing experience. Therefore, we use a set of control mechanisms to prevent creepy results and to ensure a smooth and natural video conferencing experience. The entire eye contact correction system runs end-to-end in real-time on a commodity CPU and does not require any dedicated hardware, making our solution feasible for a variety of devices.

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem that has a large amount of applications such as aiding in gaze estimation, modeling attention, fitting 3D models to video and performing face alignment. Traditionally head pose is computed by estimating some keypoints from the target face and solving the 2D to 3D correspondence problem with a mean human head model. We argue that this is a fragile method because it relies entirely on landmark detection performance, the extraneous head model and an ad-hoc fitting step. We present an elegant and robust way to determine pose by training a multi-loss convolutional neural network on 300W-LP, a large synthetically expanded dataset, to predict intrinsic Euler angles (yaw, pitch and roll) directly from image intensities through joint binned pose classification and regression. We present empirical tests on common in-the-wild pose benchmark datasets which show state-of-the-art results. Additionally we test our method on a dataset usually used for pose estimation using depth and start to close the gap with state-of-the-art depth pose methods. We open-source our training and testing code as well as release our pre-trained models.

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.

Egocentric gaze anticipation serves as a key building block for the emerging capability of Augmented Reality. Notably, gaze behavior is driven by both visual cues and audio signals during daily activities. Motivated by this observation, we introduce the first model that leverages both the video and audio modalities for egocentric gaze anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Spatial-Temporal Separable (CSTS) fusion approach that adopts two modules to separately capture audio-visual correlations in spatial and temporal dimensions, and applies a contrastive loss on the re-weighted audio-visual features from fusion modules for representation learning. We conduct extensive ablation studies and thorough analysis using two egocentric video datasets: Ego4D and Aria, to validate our model design. We demonstrate the audio improves the performance by +2.5% and +2.4% on the two datasets. Our model also outperforms the prior state-of-the-art methods by at least +1.9% and +1.6%. Moreover, we provide visualizations to show the gaze anticipation results and provide additional insights into audio-visual representation learning. The code and data split are available on our website (https://bolinlai.github.io/CSTS-EgoGazeAnticipation/).

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.

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.

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.

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/.

Many papers have shown that attention heads work in conjunction with each other to perform complex tasks. It's frequently assumed that communication between attention heads is via the addition of specific features to token residuals. In this work we seek to isolate and identify the features used to effect communication and coordination among attention heads in GPT-2 small. Our key leverage on the problem is to show that these features are very often sparsely coded in the singular vectors of attention head matrices. We characterize the dimensionality and occurrence of these signals across the attention heads in GPT-2 small when used for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. The sparse encoding of signals, as provided by attention head singular vectors, allows for efficient separation of signals from the residual background and straightforward identification of communication paths between attention heads. We explore the effectiveness of this approach by tracing portions of the circuits used in the IOI task. Our traces reveal considerable detail not present in previous studies, shedding light on the nature of redundant paths present in GPT-2. And our traces go beyond previous work by identifying features used to communicate between attention heads when performing IOI.

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.

The ability to anticipate human-object interactions is highly desirable in an intelligent assistive system in order to guide users during daily life activities and understand their short and long-term goals. Creating systems with such capabilities requires to approach several complex challenges. This work addresses the problem of human-object interaction anticipation in Egocentric Vision using Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We tackle key limitations in existing approaches by improving visual grounding capabilities through Set-of-Mark prompting and understanding user intent via the trajectory formed by the user's most recent gaze fixations. To effectively capture the temporal dynamics immediately preceding the interaction, we further introduce a novel inverse exponential sampling strategy for input video frames. Experiments conducted on the egocentric dataset HD-EPIC demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for the considered task, showing its model-agnostic nature.

To enable egocentric contextual AI in always-on smart glasses, it is crucial to be able to keep a record of the user's interactions with the world, including during reading. In this paper, we introduce a new task of reading recognition to determine when the user is reading. We first introduce the first-of-its-kind large-scale multimodal Reading in the Wild dataset, containing 100 hours of reading and non-reading videos in diverse and realistic scenarios. We then identify three modalities (egocentric RGB, eye gaze, head pose) that can be used to solve the task, and present a flexible transformer model that performs the task using these modalities, either individually or combined. We show that these modalities are relevant and complementary to the task, and investigate how to efficiently and effectively encode each modality. Additionally, we show the usefulness of this dataset towards classifying types of reading, extending current reading understanding studies conducted in constrained settings to larger scale, diversity and realism.

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

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.

The complex nature of combining localization and classification in object detection has resulted in the flourished development of methods. Previous works tried to improve the performance in various object detection heads but failed to present a unified view. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic head framework to unify object detection heads with attentions. By coherently combining multiple self-attention mechanisms between feature levels for scale-awareness, among spatial locations for spatial-awareness, and within output channels for task-awareness, the proposed approach significantly improves the representation ability of object detection heads without any computational overhead. Further experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed dynamic head on the COCO benchmark. With a standard ResNeXt-101-DCN backbone, we largely improve the performance over popular object detectors and achieve a new state-of-the-art at 54.0 AP. Furthermore, with latest transformer backbone and extra data, we can push current best COCO result to a new record at 60.6 AP. The code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/DynamicHead.

Dot-product attention has wide applications in computer vision and natural language processing. However, its memory and computational costs grow quadratically with the input size. Such growth prohibits its application on high-resolution inputs. To remedy this drawback, this paper proposes a novel efficient attention mechanism equivalent to dot-product attention but with substantially less memory and computational costs. Its resource efficiency allows more widespread and flexible integration of attention modules into a network, which leads to better accuracies. Empirical evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of its advantages. Efficient attention modules brought significant performance boosts to object detectors and instance segmenters on MS-COCO 2017. Further, the resource efficiency democratizes attention to complex models, where high costs prohibit the use of dot-product attention. As an exemplar, a model with efficient attention achieved state-of-the-art accuracies for stereo depth estimation on the Scene Flow dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/cmsflash/efficient-attention.

Envision an AI capable of functioning in human-like settings, moving beyond mere observation to actively understand, anticipate, and proactively respond to unfolding events. Towards this vision, we focus on the innovative task where, given ego-streaming video input, an assistant proactively answers diverse, evolving questions at the opportune moment, while maintaining synchronized perception and reasoning. This task embodies three key properties: (1) Proactive Coherence, (2) Just-in-Time Responsiveness, and (3) Synchronized Efficiency. To evaluate and address these properties, we first introduce ESTP-Bench (Ego Streaming Proactive Benchmark) alongside the ESTP-F1 metric-a novel framework designed for their rigorous assessment. Secondly, we propose a comprehensive technical pipeline to enable models to tackle this challenging task. This pipeline comprises: (1) a data engine, (2) a multi-stage training strategy, and (3) a proactive dynamic compression technique. Our proposed model effectively addresses these critical properties while outperforming multiple baselines across diverse online and offline benchmarks. Project Page:https://zhangyl4.github.io/publications/eyes-wide-open/

Benefiting from the capability of building inter-dependencies among channels or spatial locations, attention mechanisms have been extensively studied and broadly used in a variety of computer vision tasks recently. In this paper, we investigate light-weight but effective attention mechanisms and present triplet attention, a novel method for computing attention weights by capturing cross-dimension interaction using a three-branch structure. For an input tensor, triplet attention builds inter-dimensional dependencies by the rotation operation followed by residual transformations and encodes inter-channel and spatial information with negligible computational overhead. Our method is simple as well as efficient and can be easily plugged into classic backbone networks as an add-on module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various challenging tasks including image classification on ImageNet-1k and object detection on MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Furthermore, we provide extensive in-sight into the performance of triplet attention by visually inspecting the GradCAM and GradCAM++ results. The empirical evaluation of our method supports our intuition on the importance of capturing dependencies across dimensions when computing attention weights. Code for this paper can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/LandskapeAI/triplet-attention

Explainable face recognition is the problem of explaining why a facial matcher matches faces. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive benchmark and baseline evaluation for explainable face recognition. We define a new evaluation protocol called the ``inpainting game'', which is a curated set of 3648 triplets (probe, mate, nonmate) of 95 subjects, which differ by synthetically inpainting a chosen facial characteristic like the nose, eyebrows or mouth creating an inpainted nonmate. An explainable face matcher is tasked with generating a network attention map which best explains which regions in a probe image match with a mated image, and not with an inpainted nonmate for each triplet. This provides ground truth for quantifying what image regions contribute to face matching. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive benchmark on this dataset comparing five state of the art methods for network attention in face recognition on three facial matchers. This benchmark includes two new algorithms for network attention called subtree EBP and Density-based Input Sampling for Explanation (DISE) which outperform the state of the art by a wide margin. Finally, we show qualitative visualization of these network attention techniques on novel images, and explore how these explainable face recognition models can improve transparency and trust for facial matchers.

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.

We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences which requires zero-shot visual inferences about object shape: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated `nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.

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.

In this paper, we present the solution of our team HFUT-VUT for the MultiMediate Grand Challenge 2023 at ACM Multimedia 2023. The solution covers three sub-challenges: bodily behavior recognition, eye contact detection, and next speaker prediction. We select Swin Transformer as the baseline and exploit data augmentation strategies to address the above three tasks. Specifically, we crop the raw video to remove the noise from other parts. At the same time, we utilize data augmentation to improve the generalization of the model. As a result, our solution achieves the best results of 0.6262 for bodily behavior recognition in terms of mean average precision and the accuracy of 0.7771 for eye contact detection on the corresponding test set. In addition, our approach also achieves comparable results of 0.5281 for the next speaker prediction in terms of unweighted average recall.

The human visual system is well-tuned to detect faces of all shapes and sizes. While this brings obvious survival advantages, such as a better chance of spotting unknown predators in the bush, it also leads to spurious face detections. ``Face pareidolia'' describes the perception of face-like structure among otherwise random stimuli: seeing faces in coffee stains or clouds in the sky. In this paper, we study face pareidolia from a computer vision perspective. We present an image dataset of ``Faces in Things'', consisting of five thousand web images with human-annotated pareidolic faces. Using this dataset, we examine the extent to which a state-of-the-art human face detector exhibits pareidolia, and find a significant behavioral gap between humans and machines. We find that the evolutionary need for humans to detect animal faces, as well as human faces, may explain some of this gap. Finally, we propose a simple statistical model of pareidolia in images. Through studies on human subjects and our pareidolic face detectors we confirm a key prediction of our model regarding what image conditions are most likely to induce pareidolia. Dataset and Website: https://aka.ms/faces-in-things

In recent years, online Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have shown remarkable advancement with their powerful query-based detectors. Utilizing the output queries of the detector at the frame-level, these methods achieve high accuracy on challenging benchmarks. However, our observations demonstrate that these methods heavily rely on location information, which often causes incorrect associations between objects. This paper presents that a key axis of object matching in trackers is appearance information, which becomes greatly instructive under conditions where positional cues are insufficient for distinguishing their identities. Therefore, we suggest a simple yet powerful extension to object decoders that explicitly extract embeddings from backbone features and drive queries to capture the appearances of objects, which greatly enhances instance association accuracy. Furthermore, recognizing the limitations of existing benchmarks in fully evaluating appearance awareness, we have constructed a synthetic dataset to rigorously validate our method. By effectively resolving the over-reliance on location information, we achieve state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/KimHanjung/VISAGE.

Real-time eyeblink detection in the wild can widely serve for fatigue detection, face anti-spoofing, emotion analysis, etc. The existing research efforts generally focus on single-person cases towards trimmed video. However, multi-person scenario within untrimmed videos is also important for practical applications, which has not been well concerned yet. To address this, we shed light on this research field for the first time with essential contributions on dataset, theory, and practices. In particular, a large-scale dataset termed MPEblink that involves 686 untrimmed videos with 8748 eyeblink events is proposed under multi-person conditions. The samples are captured from unconstrained films to reveal "in the wild" characteristics. Meanwhile, a real-time multi-person eyeblink detection method is also proposed. Being different from the existing counterparts, our proposition runs in a one-stage spatio-temporal way with end-to-end learning capacity. Specifically, it simultaneously addresses the sub-tasks of face detection, face tracking, and human instance-level eyeblink detection. This paradigm holds 2 main advantages: (1) eyeblink features can be facilitated via the face's global context (e.g., head pose and illumination condition) with joint optimization and interaction, and (2) addressing these sub-tasks in parallel instead of sequential manner can save time remarkably to meet the real-time running requirement. Experiments on MPEblink verify the essential challenges of real-time multi-person eyeblink detection in the wild for untrimmed video. Our method also outperforms existing approaches by large margins and with a high inference speed.

The Transformer architecture processes sequences by implementing a form of neural message-passing that consists of iterative information retrieval (attention), followed by local processing (position-wise MLP). Two types of information are essential under this general computational paradigm: "sensory" information about individual objects, and "relational" information describing the relationships between objects. Standard attention naturally encodes the former, but does not explicitly encode the latter. In this paper, we present an extension of Transformers where multi-head attention is augmented with two distinct types of attention heads, each routing information of a different type. The first type is the standard attention mechanism of Transformers, which captures object-level features, while the second type is a novel attention mechanism we propose to explicitly capture relational information. The two types of attention heads each possess different inductive biases, giving the resulting architecture greater efficiency and versatility. The promise of this approach is demonstrated empirically across a range of tasks.

Efficient and accurate feed-forward multi-view reconstruction has long been an important task in computer vision. Recent transformer-based models like VGGT and pi^3 have achieved impressive results with simple architectures, yet they face an inherent runtime bottleneck, due to the quadratic complexity of the global attention layers, that limits the scalability to large image sets. In this paper, we empirically analyze the global attention matrix of these models and observe that probability mass concentrates on a small subset of patch-patch interactions that correspond to cross-view geometric matches. Motivated by the structured attention and inspired by recent advancement in large language models, we propose a replacement for the dense global attention operation based on highly optimized block-sparse kernels, yielding up to 4times faster inference with comparable task performance. Our retrofit requires no retraining of the backbone, extends to both VGGT and pi^3, and supports large image collections. Evaluations on a comprehensive suite of multi-view benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Technologies for recognizing facial attributes like race, gender, age, and emotion have several applications, such as surveillance, advertising content, sentiment analysis, and the study of demographic trends and social behaviors. Analyzing demographic characteristics based on images and analyzing facial expressions have several challenges due to the complexity of humans' facial attributes. Traditional approaches have employed CNNs and various other deep learning techniques, trained on extensive collections of labeled images. While these methods demonstrated effective performance, there remains potential for further enhancements. In this paper, we propose to utilize vision language models (VLMs) such as generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), GEMINI, large language and vision assistant (LLAVA), PaliGemma, and Microsoft Florence2 to recognize facial attributes such as race, gender, age, and emotion from images with human faces. Various datasets like FairFace, AffectNet, and UTKFace have been utilized to evaluate the solutions. The results show that VLMs are competitive if not superior to traditional techniques. Additionally, we propose "FaceScanPaliGemma"--a fine-tuned PaliGemma model--for race, gender, age, and emotion recognition. The results show an accuracy of 81.1%, 95.8%, 80%, and 59.4% for race, gender, age group, and emotion classification, respectively, outperforming pre-trained version of PaliGemma, other VLMs, and SotA methods. Finally, we propose "FaceScanGPT", which is a GPT-4o model to recognize the above attributes when several individuals are present in the image using a prompt engineered for a person with specific facial and/or physical attributes. The results underscore the superior multitasking capability of FaceScanGPT to detect the individual's attributes like hair cut, clothing color, postures, etc., using only a prompt to drive the detection and recognition tasks.

Human attention modelling has proven, in recent years, to be particularly useful not only for understanding the cognitive processes underlying visual exploration, but also for providing support to artificial intelligence models that aim to solve problems in various domains, including image and video processing, vision-and-language applications, and language modelling. This survey offers a reasoned overview of recent efforts to integrate human attention mechanisms into contemporary deep learning models and discusses future research directions and challenges. For a comprehensive overview on the ongoing research refer to our dedicated repository available at https://github.com/aimagelab/awesome-human-visual-attention.

Camouflaged vision perception is an important vision task with numerous practical applications. Due to the expensive collection and labeling costs, this community struggles with a major bottleneck that the species category of its datasets is limited to a small number of object species. However, the existing camouflaged generation methods require specifying the background manually, thus failing to extend the camouflaged sample diversity in a low-cost manner. In this paper, we propose a Latent Background Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion (LAKE-RED) for camouflaged image generation. To our knowledge, our contributions mainly include: (1) For the first time, we propose a camouflaged generation paradigm that does not need to receive any background inputs. (2) Our LAKE-RED is the first knowledge retrieval-augmented method with interpretability for camouflaged generation, in which we propose an idea that knowledge retrieval and reasoning enhancement are separated explicitly, to alleviate the task-specific challenges. Moreover, our method is not restricted to specific foreground targets or backgrounds, offering a potential for extending camouflaged vision perception to more diverse domains. (3) Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing approaches, generating more realistic camouflage images.

This paper presents Objectness SIMilarity (OSIM), a novel evaluation metric for 3D scenes that explicitly focuses on "objects," which are fundamental units of human visual perception. Existing metrics assess overall image quality, leading to discrepancies with human perception. Inspired by neuropsychological insights, we hypothesize that human recognition of 3D scenes fundamentally involves attention to individual objects. OSIM enables object-centric evaluations by leveraging an object detection model and its feature representations to quantify the "objectness" of each object in the scene. Our user study demonstrates that OSIM aligns more closely with human perception compared to existing metrics. We also analyze the characteristics of OSIM using various approaches. Moreover, we re-evaluate recent 3D reconstruction and generation models under a standardized experimental setup to clarify advancements in this field. The code is available at https://github.com/Objectness-Similarity/OSIM.

Existing visual tracking methods typically take an image patch as the reference of the target to perform tracking. However, a single image patch cannot provide a complete and precise concept of the target object as images are limited in their ability to abstract and can be ambiguous, which makes it difficult to track targets with drastic variations. In this paper, we propose the CiteTracker to enhance target modeling and inference in visual tracking by connecting images and text. Specifically, we develop a text generation module to convert the target image patch into a descriptive text containing its class and attribute information, providing a comprehensive reference point for the target. In addition, a dynamic description module is designed to adapt to target variations for more effective target representation. We then associate the target description and the search image using an attention-based correlation module to generate the correlated features for target state reference. Extensive experiments on five diverse datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm and the favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed tracking method.

Interest point detection and local feature description are fundamental steps in many computer vision applications. Classical methods for these tasks are based on a detect-then-describe paradigm where separate handcrafted methods are used to first identify repeatable keypoints and then represent them with a local descriptor. Neural networks trained with metric learning losses have recently caught up with these techniques, focusing on learning repeatable saliency maps for keypoint detection and learning descriptors at the detected keypoint locations. In this work, we argue that salient regions are not necessarily discriminative, and therefore can harm the performance of the description. Furthermore, we claim that descriptors should be learned only in regions for which matching can be performed with high confidence. We thus propose to jointly learn keypoint detection and description together with a predictor of the local descriptor discriminativeness. This allows us to avoid ambiguous areas and leads to reliable keypoint detections and descriptions. Our detection-and-description approach, trained with self-supervision, can simultaneously output sparse, repeatable and reliable keypoints that outperforms state-of-the-art detectors and descriptors on the HPatches dataset. It also establishes a record on the recently released Aachen Day-Night localization dataset.

A person's demonstration often serves as a key reference for others learning the same task. However, RGB video, the dominant medium for representing these demonstrations, often fails to capture fine-grained contextual cues such as intent, safety-critical environmental factors, and subtle preferences embedded in human behavior. This sensory gap fundamentally limits the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to reason about why actions occur and how they should adapt to individual users. To address this, we introduce MICA (Multimodal Interactive Contextualized Assistance), a framework that improves conversational agents for task assistance by integrating eye gaze and speech cues. MICA segments demonstrations into meaningful sub-tasks and extracts keyframes and captions that capture fine-grained intent and user-specific cues, enabling richer contextual grounding for visual question answering. Evaluations on questions derived from real-time chat-assisted task replication show that multimodal cues significantly improve response quality over frame-based retrieval. Notably, gaze cues alone achieves 93% of speech performance, and their combination yields the highest accuracy. Task type determines the effectiveness of implicit (gaze) vs. explicit (speech) cues, underscoring the need for adaptable multimodal models. These results highlight the limitations of frame-based context and demonstrate the value of multimodal signals for real-world AI task assistance.

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.

This study addresses the issue observed in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), where excessive attention on a few image tokens, referred to as blind tokens, leads to hallucinatory responses in tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of visual objects. We found that tokens receiving lower attention weights often hold essential information for identifying nuanced object details -- ranging from merely recognizing object existence to identifying their attributes (color, position, etc.) and understanding their relationships. To counteract the over-emphasis on blind tokens and to accurately respond to user queries, we introduce a technique called Attentional Vision Calibration (AVC). During the decoding phase, AVC identifies blind tokens by analyzing the image-related attention distribution. It then dynamically adjusts the logits for the next token prediction by contrasting the logits conditioned on the original visual tokens with those conditioned on the blind tokens. This effectively lowers the dependency on blind tokens and promotes a more balanced consideration of all tokens. We validate AVC on benchmarks such as POPE, MME, and AMBER, where it consistently outperforms existing decoding techniques in mitigating object hallucinations in LVLMs.

Computer vision models have been shown to exhibit and amplify biases across a wide array of datasets and tasks. Existing methods for quantifying bias in classification models primarily focus on dataset distribution and model performance on subgroups, overlooking the internal workings of a model. We introduce the Attention-IoU (Attention Intersection over Union) metric and related scores, which use attention maps to reveal biases within a model's internal representations and identify image features potentially causing the biases. First, we validate Attention-IoU on the synthetic Waterbirds dataset, showing that the metric accurately measures model bias. We then analyze the CelebA dataset, finding that Attention-IoU uncovers correlations beyond accuracy disparities. Through an investigation of individual attributes through the protected attribute of Male, we examine the distinct ways biases are represented in CelebA. Lastly, by subsampling the training set to change attribute correlations, we demonstrate that Attention-IoU reveals potential confounding variables not present in dataset labels.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

We introduce Blink, a new benchmark for multimodal language models (LLMs) that focuses on core visual perception abilities not found in other evaluations. Most of the Blink tasks can be solved by humans "within a blink" (e.g., relative depth estimation, visual correspondence, forensics detection, and multi-view reasoning). However, we find these perception-demanding tasks cast significant challenges for current multimodal LLMs because they resist mediation through natural language. Blink reformats 14 classic computer vision tasks into 3,807 multiple-choice questions, paired with single or multiple images and visual prompting. While humans get 95.70% accuracy on average, Blink is surprisingly challenging for existing multimodal LLMs: even the best-performing GPT-4V and Gemini achieve accuracies of 51.26% and 45.72%, only 13.17% and 7.63% higher than random guessing, indicating that such perception abilities have not "emerged" yet in recent multimodal LLMs. Our analysis also highlights that specialist CV models could solve these problems much better, suggesting potential pathways for future improvements. We believe Blink will stimulate the community to help multimodal LLMs catch up with human-level visual perception.

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often exhibit text inertia, where attention drifts from visual evidence toward linguistic priors, resulting in object hallucinations. Existing decoding strategies intervene only at the output logits and thus cannot correct internal reasoning drift, while recent internal-control methods based on heuristic head suppression or global steering vectors lack principled grounding. We introduce Conscious Gaze (CG-VLM), a training-free, inference-time framework that converts game-theoretic interpretability into actionable decoding control. A Cognitive Demand Sensor built on Harsanyi interactions estimates instantaneous vision-text synergy and identifies moments when visual grounding is necessary. Conditioned on this signal, a Focused Consensus Induction module selectively reorients mid-layer attention toward visual tokens before collapse into text priors. CG-VLM achieves state-of-the-art results on POPE and CHAIR across InstructBLIP, LLaVA, Qwen-VL, and mPLUG, while preserving general capabilities, demonstrating that token-level sensing enables precise, context-aware intervention without compromising foundational knowledge.

Visual attention modeling, important for interpreting and prioritizing visual stimuli, plays a significant role in applications such as marketing, multimedia, and robotics. Traditional saliency prediction models, especially those based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, achieve notable success by leveraging large-scale annotated datasets. However, the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models that use Transformers are computationally expensive. Additionally, separate models are often required for each image type, lacking a unified approach. In this paper, we propose Saliency Unification through Mamba (SUM), a novel approach that integrates the efficient long-range dependency modeling of Mamba with U-Net to provide a unified model for diverse image types. Using a novel Conditional Visual State Space (C-VSS) block, SUM dynamically adapts to various image types, including natural scenes, web pages, and commercial imagery, ensuring universal applicability across different data types. Our comprehensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that SUM seamlessly adapts to different visual characteristics and consistently outperforms existing models. These results position SUM as a versatile and powerful tool for advancing visual attention modeling, offering a robust solution universally applicable across different types of visual content.

Face detection is one of the most studied topics in the computer vision community. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face detection benchmark datasets. We show that there is a gap between current face detection performance and the real world requirements. To facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face bounding boxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performance and propose a solution to deal with large scale variation. Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to be further investigated. Dataset can be downloaded at: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/WIDERFace

The prediction of saliency areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper however addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional network. The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train a not very deep architecture which is both fast and accurate. The convolutional network in this paper, named JuntingNet, won the LSUN 2015 challenge on saliency prediction with a superior performance in all considered metrics.

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.

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.

Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.

Predicting salient regions in natural images requires the detection of objects that are present in a scene. To develop robust representations for this challenging task, high-level visual features at multiple spatial scales must be extracted and augmented with contextual information. However, existing models aimed at explaining human fixation maps do not incorporate such a mechanism explicitly. Here we propose an approach based on a convolutional neural network pre-trained on a large-scale image classification task. The architecture forms an encoder-decoder structure and includes a module with multiple convolutional layers at different dilation rates to capture multi-scale features in parallel. Moreover, we combine the resulting representations with global scene information for accurately predicting visual saliency. Our model achieves competitive and consistent results across multiple evaluation metrics on two public saliency benchmarks and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested approach on five datasets and selected examples. Compared to state of the art approaches, the network is based on a lightweight image classification backbone and hence presents a suitable choice for applications with limited computational resources, such as (virtual) robotic systems, to estimate human fixations across complex natural scenes.

Current perceptual similarity metrics operate at the level of pixels and patches. These metrics compare images in terms of their low-level colors and textures, but fail to capture mid-level similarities and differences in image layout, object pose, and semantic content. In this paper, we develop a perceptual metric that assesses images holistically. Our first step is to collect a new dataset of human similarity judgments over image pairs that are alike in diverse ways. Critical to this dataset is that judgments are nearly automatic and shared by all observers. To achieve this we use recent text-to-image models to create synthetic pairs that are perturbed along various dimensions. We observe that popular perceptual metrics fall short of explaining our new data, and we introduce a new metric, DreamSim, tuned to better align with human perception. We analyze how our metric is affected by different visual attributes, and find that it focuses heavily on foreground objects and semantic content while also being sensitive to color and layout. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, our metric generalizes to real images, giving strong results on retrieval and reconstruction tasks. Furthermore, our metric outperforms both prior learned metrics and recent large vision models on these tasks.

Current feature matching methods focus on point-level matching, pursuing better representation learning of individual features, but lacking further understanding of the scene. This results in significant performance degradation when handling challenging scenes such as scenes with large viewpoint and illumination changes. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model named SAM, which applies attentional grouping to guide Scene-Aware feature Matching. SAM handles multi-level features, i.e., image tokens and group tokens, with attention layers, and groups the image tokens with the proposed token grouping module. Our model can be trained by ground-truth matches only and produce reasonable grouping results. With the sense-aware grouping guidance, SAM is not only more accurate and robust but also more interpretable than conventional feature matching models. Sufficient experiments on various applications, including homography estimation, pose estimation, and image matching, demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Visual prompting techniques are widely used to efficiently fine-tune pretrained Vision Transformers (ViT) by learning a small set of shared prompts for all tokens. However, existing methods overlook the unique roles of different tokens in conveying discriminative information and interact with all tokens using the same prompts, thereby limiting the representational capacity of ViT. This often leads to indistinguishable and biased prompt-extracted features, hindering performance. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play Token Coordinated Prompt Attention (TCPA) module, which assigns specific coordinated prompts to different tokens for attention-based interactions. Firstly, recognizing the distinct functions of CLS and image tokens-global information aggregation and local feature extraction, we disentangle the prompts into CLS Prompts and Image Prompts, which interact exclusively with CLS tokens and image tokens through attention mechanisms. This enhances their respective discriminative abilities. Furthermore, as different image tokens correspond to distinct image patches and contain diverse information, we employ a matching function to automatically assign coordinated prompts to individual tokens. This enables more precise attention interactions, improving the diversity and representational capacity of the extracted features. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that TCPA significantly enhances the diversity and discriminative power of the extracted features. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICML2025-TCPA.

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models specialize in specific semantic or visual attributes. Building on an established interpretability method, we reinterpret the practice of probing intermediate activations with the final decoding layer through the lens of signal processing. This lets us analyze multiple samples in a principled way and rank attention heads based on their relevance to target concepts. Our results show consistent patterns of specialization at the head level across both unimodal and multimodal transformers. Remarkably, we find that editing as few as 1% of the heads, selected using our method, can reliably suppress or enhance targeted concepts in the model output. We validate our approach on language tasks such as question answering and toxicity mitigation, as well as vision-language tasks including image classification and captioning. Our findings highlight an interpretable and controllable structure within attention layers, offering simple tools for understanding and editing large-scale generative models.

As large language models evolve, there is growing anticipation that they will emulate human-like Theory of Mind (ToM) to assist with routine tasks. However, existing methods for evaluating machine ToM focus primarily on unimodal models and largely treat these models as black boxes, lacking an interpretative exploration of their internal mechanisms. In response, this study adopts an approach based on internal mechanisms to provide an interpretability-driven assessment of ToM in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we first construct a multimodal ToM test dataset, GridToM, which incorporates diverse belief testing tasks and perceptual information from multiple perspectives. Next, our analysis shows that attention heads in multimodal large models can distinguish cognitive information across perspectives, providing evidence of ToM capabilities. Furthermore, we present a lightweight, training-free approach that significantly enhances the model's exhibited ToM by adjusting in the direction of the attention head.

As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mArho up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mArho up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.

Previous methods solve feature matching and pose estimation using a two-stage process by first finding matches and then estimating the pose. As they ignore the geometric relationships between the two tasks, they focus on either improving the quality of matches or filtering potential outliers, leading to limited efficiency or accuracy. In contrast, we propose an iterative matching and pose estimation framework (IMP) leveraging the geometric connections between the two tasks: a few good matches are enough for a roughly accurate pose estimation; a roughly accurate pose can be used to guide the matching by providing geometric constraints. To this end, we implement a geometry-aware recurrent attention-based module which jointly outputs sparse matches and camera poses. Specifically, for each iteration, we first implicitly embed geometric information into the module via a pose-consistency loss, allowing it to predict geometry-aware matches progressively. Second, we introduce an efficient IMP, called EIMP, to dynamically discard keypoints without potential matches, avoiding redundant updating and significantly reducing the quadratic time complexity of attention computation in transformers. Experiments on YFCC100m, Scannet, and Aachen Day-Night datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

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 recent years, there has been increasing interest in automatic facial behavior analysis systems from computing communities such as vision, multimodal interaction, robotics, and affective computing. Building upon the widespread utility of prior open-source facial analysis systems, we introduce OpenFace 3.0, an open-source toolkit capable of facial landmark detection, facial action unit detection, eye-gaze estimation, and facial emotion recognition. OpenFace 3.0 contributes a lightweight unified model for facial analysis, trained with a multi-task architecture across diverse populations, head poses, lighting conditions, video resolutions, and facial analysis tasks. By leveraging the benefits of parameter sharing through a unified model and training paradigm, OpenFace 3.0 exhibits improvements in prediction performance, inference speed, and memory efficiency over similar toolkits and rivals state-of-the-art models. OpenFace 3.0 can be installed and run with a single line of code and operate in real-time without specialized hardware. OpenFace 3.0 code for training models and running the system is freely available for research purposes and supports contributions from the community.

We explore social perception of human faces in CLIP, a widely used open-source vision-language model. To this end, we compare the similarity in CLIP embeddings between different textual prompts and a set of face images. Our textual prompts are constructed from well-validated social psychology terms denoting social perception. The face images are synthetic and are systematically and independently varied along six dimensions: the legally protected attributes of age, gender, and race, as well as facial expression, lighting, and pose. Independently and systematically manipulating face attributes allows us to study the effect of each on social perception and avoids confounds that can occur in wild-collected data due to uncontrolled systematic correlations between attributes. Thus, our findings are experimental rather than observational. Our main findings are three. First, while CLIP is trained on the widest variety of images and texts, it is able to make fine-grained human-like social judgments on face images. Second, age, gender, and race do systematically impact CLIP's social perception of faces, suggesting an undesirable bias in CLIP vis-a-vis legally protected attributes. Most strikingly, we find a strong pattern of bias concerning the faces of Black women, where CLIP produces extreme values of social perception across different ages and facial expressions. Third, facial expression impacts social perception more than age and lighting as much as age. The last finding predicts that studies that do not control for unprotected visual attributes may reach the wrong conclusions on bias. Our novel method of investigation, which is founded on the social psychology literature and on the experiments involving the manipulation of individual attributes, yields sharper and more reliable observations than previous observational methods and may be applied to study biases in any vision-language model.

We address the problem of Embodied Reference Understanding, which involves predicting the object that a person in the scene is referring to through both pointing gesture and language. Accurately identifying the referent requires multimodal understanding: integrating textual instructions, visual pointing, and scene context. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively leverage visual clues for disambiguation. We also observe that, while the referent is often aligned with the head-to-fingertip line, it occasionally aligns more closely with the wrist-to-fingertip line. Therefore, relying on a single line assumption can be overly simplistic and may lead to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a dual-model framework, where one model learns from the head-to-fingertip direction and the other from the wrist-to-fingertip direction. We further introduce a Gaussian ray heatmap representation of these lines and use them as input to provide a strong supervisory signal that encourages the model to better attend to pointing cues. To combine the strengths of both models, we present the CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble module, which performs a hybrid ensemble based on CLIP features. Additionally, we propose an object center prediction head as an auxiliary task to further enhance referent localization. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and analysis on the benchmark YouRefIt dataset, achieving an improvement of approximately 4 mAP at the 0.25 IoU threshold.

Saliency methods can aid understanding of deep neural networks. Recent years have witnessed many improvements to saliency methods, as well as new ways for evaluating them. In this paper, we 1) present a novel region-based attribution method, XRAI, that builds upon integrated gradients (Sundararajan et al. 2017), 2) introduce evaluation methods for empirically assessing the quality of image-based saliency maps (Performance Information Curves (PICs)), and 3) contribute an axiom-based sanity check for attribution methods. Through empirical experiments and example results, we show that XRAI produces better results than other saliency methods for common models and the ImageNet dataset.

The space of task-agnostic feature upsampling has emerged as a promising area of research to efficiently create denser features from pre-trained visual backbones. These methods act as a shortcut to achieve dense features for a fraction of the cost by learning to map low-resolution features to high-resolution versions. While early works in this space used iterative upsampling approaches, more recent works have switched to cross-attention-based methods, which risk falling into the same efficiency scaling problems of the backbones they are upsampling. In this work, we demonstrate that iterative upsampling methods can still compete with cross-attention-based methods; moreover, they can achieve state-of-the-art performance with lower inference costs. We propose UPLiFT, an architecture for Universal Pixel-dense Lightweight Feature Transforms. We also propose an efficient Local Attender operator to overcome the limitations of prior iterative feature upsampling methods. This operator uses an alternative attentional pooling formulation defined fully locally. We show that our Local Attender allows UPLiFT to maintain stable features throughout upsampling, enabling state-of-the-art performance with lower inference costs than existing pixel-dense feature upsamplers. In addition, we apply UPLiFT to generative downstream tasks and show that it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art Coupled Flow Matching models for VAE feature upsampling. Altogether, UPLiFT offers a versatile and efficient approach to creating denser features.

We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.

This paper addresses the challenges of face attribute detection specifically in the Indian context. While there are numerous face datasets in unconstrained environments, none of them captures emotions in different face orientations. Moreover, there is an under-representation of people of Indian ethnicity in these datasets since they have been scraped from popular search engines. As a result, the performance of state-of-the-art techniques can't be evaluated on Indian faces. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, IIITM Face, for the scientific community to address these challenges. Our dataset includes 107 participants who exhibit 6 emotions in 3 different face orientations. Each of these images is further labelled on attributes like gender, presence of moustache, beard or eyeglasses, clothes worn by the subjects and the density of their hair. Moreover, the images are captured in high resolution with specific background colors which can be easily replaced by cluttered backgrounds to simulate `in the Wild' behaviour. We demonstrate the same by constructing IIITM Face-SUE. Both IIITM Face and IIITM Face-SUE have been benchmarked across key multi-label metrics for the research community to compare their results.

We introduce Look and Tell, a multimodal dataset for studying referential communication across egocentric and exocentric perspectives. Using Meta Project Aria smart glasses and stationary cameras, we recorded synchronized gaze, speech, and video as 25 participants instructed a partner to identify ingredients in a kitchen. Combined with 3D scene reconstructions, this setup provides a benchmark for evaluating how different spatial representations (2D vs. 3D; ego vs. exo) affect multimodal grounding. The dataset contains 3.67 hours of recordings, including 2,707 richly annotated referential expressions, and is designed to advance the development of embodied agents that can understand and engage in situated dialogue.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) have driven progress in GUI automation. However, most existing methods rely on static, one-shot visual inputs and passive perception, lacking the ability to adaptively determine when, whether, and how to observe the interface. We present GUI-Eyes, a reinforcement learning framework for active visual perception in GUI tasks. To acquire more informative observations, the agent learns to make strategic decisions on both whether and how to invoke visual tools, such as cropping or zooming, within a two-stage reasoning process. To support this behavior, we introduce a progressive perception strategy that decomposes decision-making into coarse exploration and fine-grained grounding, coordinated by a two-level policy. In addition, we design a spatially continuous reward function tailored to tool usage, which integrates both location proximity and region overlap to provide dense supervision and alleviate the reward sparsity common in GUI environments. On the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, GUI-Eyes-3B achieves 44.8% grounding accuracy using only 3k labeled samples, significantly outperforming both supervised and RL-based baselines. These results highlight that tool-aware active perception, enabled by staged policy reasoning and fine-grained reward feedback, is critical for building robust and data-efficient GUI agents.

We present BoTNet, a conceptually simple yet powerful backbone architecture that incorporates self-attention for multiple computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. By just replacing the spatial convolutions with global self-attention in the final three bottleneck blocks of a ResNet and no other changes, our approach improves upon the baselines significantly on instance segmentation and object detection while also reducing the parameters, with minimal overhead in latency. Through the design of BoTNet, we also point out how ResNet bottleneck blocks with self-attention can be viewed as Transformer blocks. Without any bells and whistles, BoTNet achieves 44.4% Mask AP and 49.7% Box AP on the COCO Instance Segmentation benchmark using the Mask R-CNN framework; surpassing the previous best published single model and single scale results of ResNeSt evaluated on the COCO validation set. Finally, we present a simple adaptation of the BoTNet design for image classification, resulting in models that achieve a strong performance of 84.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet benchmark while being up to 1.64x faster in compute time than the popular EfficientNet models on TPU-v3 hardware. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in self-attention models for vision

Recent guidance methods in diffusion models steer reverse sampling by perturbing the model to construct an implicit weak model and guide generation away from it. Among these approaches, attention perturbation has demonstrated strong empirical performance in unconditional scenarios where classifier-free guidance is not applicable. However, existing attention perturbation methods lack principled approaches for determining where perturbations should be applied, particularly in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures where quality-relevant computations are distributed across layers. In this paper, we investigate the granularity of attention perturbations, ranging from the layer level down to individual attention heads, and discover that specific heads govern distinct visual concepts such as structure, style, and texture quality. Building on this insight, we propose "HeadHunter", a systematic framework for iteratively selecting attention heads that align with user-centric objectives, enabling fine-grained control over generation quality and visual attributes. In addition, we introduce SoftPAG, which linearly interpolates each selected head's attention map toward an identity matrix, providing a continuous knob to tune perturbation strength and suppress artifacts. Our approach not only mitigates the oversmoothing issues of existing layer-level perturbation but also enables targeted manipulation of specific visual styles through compositional head selection. We validate our method on modern large-scale DiT-based text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1, demonstrating superior performance in both general quality enhancement and style-specific guidance. Our work provides the first head-level analysis of attention perturbation in diffusion models, uncovering interpretable specialization within attention layers and enabling practical design of effective perturbation strategies.

This paper examines algorithmic lookism-the systematic preferential treatment based on physical appearance-in text-to-image (T2I) generative AI and a downstream gender classification task. Through the analysis of 26,400 synthetic faces created with Stable Diffusion 2.1 and 3.5 Medium, we demonstrate how generative AI models systematically associate facial attractiveness with positive attributes and vice-versa, mirroring socially constructed biases rather than evidence-based correlations. Furthermore, we find significant gender bias in three gender classification algorithms depending on the attributes of the input faces. Our findings reveal three critical harms: (1) the systematic encoding of attractiveness-positive attribute associations in T2I models; (2) gender disparities in classification systems, where women's faces, particularly those generated with negative attributes, suffer substantially higher misclassification rates than men's; and (3) intensifying aesthetic constraints in newer models through age homogenization, gendered exposure patterns, and geographic reductionism. These convergent patterns reveal algorithmic lookism as systematic infrastructure operating across AI vision systems, compounding existing inequalities through both representation and recognition. Disclaimer: This work includes visual and textual content that reflects stereotypical associations between physical appearance and socially constructed attributes, including gender, race, and traits associated with social desirability. Any such associations found in this study emerge from the biases embedded in generative AI systems-not from empirical truths or the authors' views.

Humans can effortlessly locate desired objects in cluttered environments, relying on a cognitive mechanism known as visual search to efficiently filter out irrelevant information and focus on task-related regions. Inspired by this process, we propose Dyfo (Dynamic Focus), a training-free dynamic focusing visual search method that enhances fine-grained visual understanding in large multimodal models (LMMs). Unlike existing approaches which require additional modules or data collection, Dyfo leverages a bidirectional interaction between LMMs and visual experts, using a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to simulate human-like focus adjustments. This enables LMMs to focus on key visual regions while filtering out irrelevant content, without introducing additional training caused by vocabulary expansion or the integration of specialized localization modules. Experimental results demonstrate that Dyfo significantly improves fine-grained visual understanding and reduces hallucination issues in LMMs, achieving superior performance across both fixed and dynamic resolution models. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/DyFo_CVPR2025

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.

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.

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set, models used to address them should be permutation invariant. We present an attention-based neural network module, the Set Transformer, specifically designed to model interactions among elements in the input set. The model consists of an encoder and a decoder, both of which rely on attention mechanisms. In an effort to reduce computational complexity, we introduce an attention scheme inspired by inducing point methods from sparse Gaussian process literature. It reduces the computation time of self-attention from quadratic to linear in the number of elements in the set. We show that our model is theoretically attractive and we evaluate it on a range of tasks, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance compared to recent methods for set-structured data.

An image, especially with high-resolution, typically consists of numerous visual elements, ranging from dominant large objects to fine-grained detailed objects. When perceiving such images, multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) face limitations due to the restricted input resolution of the pretrained vision encoder and the cluttered, dense context of the image, resulting in a focus on primary objects while easily overlooking detailed ones. In this paper, we propose Zoom Eye, a tree search algorithm designed to navigate the hierarchical and visual nature of images to capture relevant information. Zoom Eye conceptualizes an image as a tree, with each children node representing a zoomed sub-patch of the parent node and the root represents the overall image. Moreover, Zoom Eye is model-agnostic and training-free, so it enables any MLLMs to simulate human zooming actions by searching along the image tree from root to leaf nodes, seeking out pertinent information, and accurately responding to related queries. We experiment on a series of elaborate high-resolution benchmarks and the results demonstrate that Zoom Eye not only consistently improves the performance of a series base MLLMs with large margin~(e.g., LLaVA-v1.5-7B increases by 34.57\% on V^* Bench and 17.88\% on HR-Bench), but also enables small 7B MLLMs to outperform strong large models such as GPT-4o. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye}.