Scanpath Prediction

As AI-generated image edits proliferate, the platforms meant to curb the resulting disinformation treat detectability as a single, undifferentiated property: an edit either gets a warning or it does not. We show this is the wrong model. Across a controlled eye-tracking study ($N=59$, Latin-square design, four conditions crossing edit area and semantic plausibility), a mixed-effects analysis reveals that whether an edit is noticed and whether it is correctly judged as fake are dissociable stages, governed by different factors: edit area drives attention capture ($p<0.001$) while semantic plausibility drives judgment accuracy and look-but-fail-to-see (LBFS) error rates ($p<0.001$). This dissociation survives correction for multiple comparisons; a secondary interaction between the two factors does not. This two-stage account extends a long-standing distinction in visual attention research (between pre-attentive capture and effortful recognition) into the new domain of AI-edit detectability. We then test whether a generative eye-movement model can computationally operationalize the attention-capture stage: a Transformer trained to generate scanpaths tracks per-image attention with strong discriminative power (Pearson $r=0.77$--$0.82$ across held-out stimuli) and, on the harder task of predicting LBFS incidence, modestly outperforms a two-parameter linear baseline even without access to the plausibility label ($r=0.52$ vs. $r=0.48$). We report this comparison, our ablations, and our method's limitations (a single fixed train/validation split, not leave-one-subject-out) without inflation, consistent with responsibly communicating what a machine learning system can and cannot do to help curb AI-driven disinformation.

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

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

Object Referring-guided Scanpath Prediction (ORSP) aims to predict the human attention scanpath when they search for a specific target object in a visual scene according to a linguistic description describing the object. Multimodal information fusion is a key point of ORSP. Therefore, we propose a novel model, ScanVLA, to first exploit a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract and fuse inherently aligned visual and linguistic feature representations from the input image and referring expression. Next, to enhance the ScanVLA's perception of fine-grained positional information, we not only propose a novel History Enhanced Scanpath Decoder (HESD) that directly takes historical fixations' position information as input to help predict a more reasonable position for the current fixation, but also adopt a frozen Segmentation LoRA as an auxiliary component to help localize the referred object more precisely, which improves the scanpath prediction task without incurring additional large computational and time costs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ScanVLA can significantly outperform existing scanpath prediction methods under object referring.

Semantics are one of the primary sources of top-down preattentive information. Modern deep object detectors excel at extracting such valuable semantic cues from complex visual scenes. However, the size of the visual input to be processed by these detectors can become a bottleneck, particularly in terms of time costs, affecting an artificial attention system's biological plausibility and real-time deployability. Inspired by classical exponential density roll-off topologies, we apply a new artificial foveation module to our novel attention prediction pipeline: the Semantic-based Bayesian Attention (SemBA) framework. We aim at reducing detection-related computational costs without compromising visual task accuracy, thereby making SemBA more biologically plausible. The proposed multi-scale pyramidal field-of-view retains maximum acuity at an innermost level, around a focal point, while gradually increasing distortion for outer levels to mimic peripheral uncertainty via downsampling. In this work we evaluate the performance of our novel Multi-Scale Fovea, incorporated into SemBA, on target-present visual search. We also compare it against other artificial foveal systems, and conduct ablation studies with different deep object detection models to assess the impact of the new topology in terms of computational costs. We experimentally demonstrate that including the new Multi-Scale Fovea module effectively reduces inherent processing costs while improving SemBA's scanpath prediction accuracy. Remarkably, we show that SemBA closely approximates human consistency while retaining the actual human fovea's proportions.

Optimizing vision models purely for classification accuracy can impose an alignment tax, degrading human-like scanpaths and limiting interpretability. We introduce EVA, a neuroscience-inspired hard-attention mechanistic testbed that makes the performance-human-likeness trade-off explicit and adjustable. EVA samples a small number of sequential glimpses using a minimal fovea-periphery representation with CNN-based feature extractor and integrates variance control and adaptive gating to stabilize and regulate attention dynamics. EVA is trained with the standard classification objective without gaze supervision. On CIFAR-10 with dense human gaze annotations, EVA improves scanpath alignment under established metrics such as DTW, NSS, while maintaining competitive accuracy. Ablations show that CNN-based feature extraction drives accuracy but suppresses human-likeness, whereas variance control and gating restore human-aligned trajectories with minimal performance loss. We further validate EVA's scalability on ImageNet-100 and evaluate scanpath alignment on COCO-Search18 without COCO-Search18 gaze supervision or finetuning, where EVA yields human-like scanpaths on natural scenes without additional training. Overall, EVA provides a principled framework for trustworthy, human-interpretable active vision.

Blind 360°image quality assessment (IQA) aims to predict perceptual quality for panoramic images without a pristine reference. Unlike conventional planar images, 360°content in immersive environments restricts viewers to a limited viewport at any moment, making viewing behaviors critical to quality perception. Although existing scanpath-based approaches have attempted to model viewing behaviors by approximating the human view-then-rate paradigm, they treat scanpath generation and quality assessment as separate steps, preventing end-to-end optimization and task-aligned exploration. To address this limitation, we propose RL-ScanIQA, a reinforcement-learned framework for blind 360°IQA. RL-ScanIQA optimize a PPO-trained scanpath policy and a quality assessor, where the policy receives quality-driven feedback to learn task-relevant viewing strategies. To improve training stability and prevent mode collapse, we design multi-level rewards, including scanpath diversity and equator-biased priors. We further boost cross-dataset robustness using distortion-space augmentation together with rank-consistent losses that preserve intra-image and inter-image quality orderings. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that RL-ScanIQA achieves superior in-dataset performance and cross-dataset generalization. Codes are available at https://github.com/wangyuji1/RLScanIQA.git.

Understanding human visual attention is key to preserving cultural heritage We introduce SPGen a novel deep learning model to predict scanpaths the sequence of eye movementswhen viewers observe paintings. Our architecture uses a Fully Convolutional Neural Network FCNN with differentiable fixation selection and learnable Gaussian priors to simulate natural viewing biases To address the domain gap between photographs and artworks we employ unsupervised domain adaptation via a gradient reversal layer allowing the model to transfer knowledge from natural scenes to paintings Furthermore a random noise sampler models the inherent stochasticity of eyetracking data. Extensive testing shows SPGen outperforms existing methods offering a powerful tool to analyze gaze behavior and advance the preservation and appreciation of artistic treasures.