Daily Papers

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.

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.

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.

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.

Decoding non-invasive brain recordings is pivotal for advancing our understanding of human cognition but faces challenges due to individual differences and complex neural signal representations. Traditional methods often require customized models and extensive trials, lacking interpretability in visual reconstruction tasks. Our framework integrates 3D brain structures with visual semantics using a Vision Transformer 3D. This unified feature extractor efficiently aligns fMRI features with multiple levels of visual embeddings, eliminating the need for subject-specific models and allowing extraction from single-trial data. The extractor consolidates multi-level visual features into one network, simplifying integration with Large Language Models (LLMs). Additionally, we have enhanced the fMRI dataset with diverse fMRI-image-related textual data to support multimodal large model development. Integrating with LLMs enhances decoding capabilities, enabling tasks such as brain captioning, complex reasoning, concept localization, and visual reconstruction. Our approach demonstrates superior performance across these tasks, precisely identifying language-based concepts within brain signals, enhancing interpretability, and providing deeper insights into neural processes. These advances significantly broaden the applicability of non-invasive brain decoding in neuroscience and human-computer interaction, setting the stage for advanced brain-computer interfaces and cognitive models.

Visual Information Extraction (VIE) converts unstructured document images into structured formats like JSON, critical for medical applications such as report analysis and online consultations. Traditional methods rely on OCR and language models, while end-to-end multimodal models offer direct JSON generation. However, domain-specific schemas and high annotation costs limit their effectiveness in medical VIE. We base our approach on the Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework to address these challenges using only 100 annotated samples. Our approach ensures dataset diversity, a balanced precision-recall reward mechanism to reduce hallucinations and improve field coverage, and innovative sampling strategies to enhance reasoning capabilities. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our RLVR method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on medical VIE tasks, significantly improving F1, precision, and recall. While our models excel on tasks similar to medical datasets, performance drops on dissimilar tasks, highlighting the need for domain-specific optimization. Case studies further demonstrate the value of reasoning during training and inference for VIE.

Single-view 3D face reconstruction is a fundamental Computer Vision problem of extraordinary difficulty. Current systems often assume the input is unobstructed faces which makes their method not suitable for in-the-wild conditions. We present a method for performing a 3D face that removes eyeglasses from a single image. Existing facial reconstruction methods fail to remove eyeglasses automatically for generating a photo-realistic 3D face "in-the-wild".The innovation of our method lies in a process for identifying the eyeglasses area robustly and remove it intelligently. In this work, we estimate the 2D face structure of the reasonable position of the eyeglasses area, which is used for the construction of 3D texture. An excellent anti-eyeglasses face reconstruction method should ensure the authenticity of the output, including the topological structure between the eyes, nose, and mouth. We achieve this via a deep learning architecture that performs direct regression of a 3DMM representation of the 3D facial geometry from a single 2D image. We also demonstrate how the related face parsing task can be incorporated into the proposed framework and help improve reconstruction quality. We conduct extensive experiments on existing 3D face reconstruction tasks as concrete examples to demonstrate the method's superior regulation ability over existing methods often break down.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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

This paper 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 propose a new approach to extracting data items or field values from semi-structured documents. Examples of such problems include extracting passenger name, departure time and departure airport from a travel itinerary, or extracting price of an item from a purchase receipt. Traditional approaches to data extraction use machine learning or program synthesis to process the whole document to extract the desired fields. Such approaches are not robust to format changes in the document, and the extraction process typically fails even if changes are made to parts of the document that are unrelated to the desired fields of interest. We propose a new approach to data extraction based on the concepts of landmarks and regions. Humans routinely use landmarks in manual processing of documents to zoom in and focus their attention on small regions of interest in the document. Inspired by this human intuition, we use the notion of landmarks in program synthesis to automatically synthesize extraction programs that first extract a small region of interest, and then automatically extract the desired value from the region in a subsequent step. We have implemented our landmark-based extraction approach in a tool LRSyn, and show extensive evaluation on documents in HTML as well as scanned images of invoices and receipts. Our results show that our approach is robust to various types of format changes that routinely happen in real-world settings.

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

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

Recently, diffusion-based methods, like InstructPix2Pix (IP2P), have achieved effective instruction-based image editing, requiring only natural language instructions from the user. However, these methods often inadvertently alter unintended areas and struggle with multi-instruction editing, resulting in compromised outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Focus on Your Instruction (FoI), a method designed to ensure precise and harmonious editing across multiple instructions without extra training or test-time optimization. In the FoI, we primarily emphasize two aspects: (1) precisely extracting regions of interest for each instruction and (2) guiding the denoising process to concentrate within these regions of interest. For the first objective, we identify the implicit grounding capability of IP2P from the cross-attention between instruction and image, then develop an effective mask extraction method. For the second objective, we introduce a cross attention modulation module for rough isolation of target editing regions and unrelated regions. Additionally, we introduce a mask-guided disentangle sampling strategy to further ensure clear region isolation. Experimental results demonstrate that FoI surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, especially excelling in multi-instruction editing task.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their final predictions for text completion tasks. Yet little is known about the specific role of attention heads in producing the final token prediction. We propose Attention Lens, a tool that enables researchers to translate the outputs of attention heads into vocabulary tokens via learned attention-head-specific transformations called lenses. Preliminary findings from our trained lenses indicate that attention heads play highly specialized roles in language models. The code for Attention Lens is available at github.com/msakarvadia/AttentionLens.

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

Surgical practice involves complex visual interpretation, procedural skills, and advanced medical knowledge, making surgical vision-language pretraining (VLP) particularly challenging due to this complexity and the limited availability of annotated data. To address the gap, we propose OphCLIP, a hierarchical retrieval-augmented vision-language pretraining framework specifically designed for ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. OphCLIP leverages the OphVL dataset we constructed, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of over 375K hierarchically structured video-text pairs with tens of thousands of different combinations of attributes (surgeries, phases/operations/actions, instruments, medications, as well as more advanced aspects like the causes of eye diseases, surgical objectives, and postoperative recovery recommendations, etc). These hierarchical video-text correspondences enable OphCLIP to learn both fine-grained and long-term visual representations by aligning short video clips with detailed narrative descriptions and full videos with structured titles, capturing intricate surgical details and high-level procedural insights, respectively. Our OphCLIP also designs a retrieval-augmented pretraining framework to leverage the underexplored large-scale silent surgical procedure videos, automatically retrieving semantically relevant content to enhance the representation learning of narrative videos. Evaluation across 11 datasets for phase recognition and multi-instrument identification shows OphCLIP's robust generalization and superior performance.

Common editing operations performed by professional photographers include the cleanup operations: de-emphasizing distracting elements and enhancing subjects. These edits are challenging, requiring a delicate balance between manipulating the viewer's attention while maintaining photo realism. While recent approaches can boast successful examples of attention attenuation or amplification, most of them also suffer from frequent unrealistic edits. We propose a realism loss for saliency-guided image enhancement to maintain high realism across varying image types, while attenuating distractors and amplifying objects of interest. Evaluations with professional photographers confirm that we achieve the dual objective of realism and effectiveness, and outperform the recent approaches on their own datasets, while requiring a smaller memory footprint and runtime. We thus offer a viable solution for automating image enhancement and photo cleanup operations.

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

Visual 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.

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

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

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

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.

We present a novel bird's-eye-view (BEV) detector with perspective supervision, which converges faster and better suits modern image backbones. Existing state-of-the-art BEV detectors are often tied to certain depth pre-trained backbones like VoVNet, hindering the synergy between booming image backbones and BEV detectors. To address this limitation, we prioritize easing the optimization of BEV detectors by introducing perspective space supervision. To this end, we propose a two-stage BEV detector, where proposals from the perspective head are fed into the bird's-eye-view head for final predictions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive ablation studies focusing on the form of supervision and the generality of the proposed detector. The proposed method is verified with a wide spectrum of traditional and modern image backbones and achieves new SoTA results on the large-scale nuScenes dataset. The code shall be released soon.

Text-prompted image segmentation enables fine-grained visual understanding and is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and robotics. However, existing supervised fine-tuning methods typically ignore explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning at test time, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen prompts and domains. To address this issue, we introduce LENS, a scalable reinforcement-learning framework that jointly optimizes the reasoning process and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. We propose unified reinforcement-learning rewards that span sentence-, box-, and segment-level cues, encouraging the model to generate informative CoT rationales while refining mask quality. Using a publicly available 3-billion-parameter vision-language model, i.e., Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, LENS achieves an average cIoU of 81.2% on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks, outperforming the strong fine-tuned method, i.e., GLaMM, by up to 5.6%. These results demonstrate that RL-driven CoT reasoning serves as a robust prior for text-prompted segmentation and offers a practical path toward more generalizable Segment Anything models. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/LENS.

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}.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance in User Interface (UI) grounding tasks, driven by their ability to process increasingly high-resolution screenshots. However, screenshots are tokenized into thousands of visual tokens (e.g., about 4700 for 2K resolution), incurring significant computational overhead and diluting attention. In contrast, humans typically focus on regions of interest when interacting with UI. In this work, we pioneer the task of efficient UI grounding. Guided by practical analysis of the task's characteristics and challenges, we propose FocusUI, an efficient UI grounding framework that selects patches most relevant to the instruction while preserving positional continuity for precise grounding. FocusUI addresses two key challenges: (1) Eliminating redundant tokens in visual encoding. We construct patch-level supervision by fusing an instruction-conditioned score with a rule-based UI-graph score that down-weights large homogeneous regions to select distinct and instruction-relevant visual tokens. (2) Preserving positional continuity during visual token selection. We find that general visual token pruning methods suffer from severe accuracy degradation on UI grounding tasks due to broken positional information. We introduce a novel PosPad strategy, which compresses each contiguous sequence of dropped visual tokens into a single special marker placed at the sequence's last index to preserve positional continuity. Comprehensive experiments on four grounding benchmarks demonstrate that FocusUI surpasses GUI-specific baselines. On the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, FocusUI-7B achieves a performance improvement of 3.7% over GUI-Actor-7B. Even with only 30% visual token retention, FocusUI-7B drops by only 3.2% while achieving up to 1.44x faster inference and 17% lower peak GPU memory.

Comprehending long visual documents, where information is distributed across extensive pages of text and visual elements, is a critical but challenging task for modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing approaches falter on a fundamental challenge: evidence localization. They struggle to retrieve relevant pages and overlook fine-grained details within visual elements, leading to limited performance and model hallucination. To address this, we propose DocLens, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that effectively ``zooms in'' on evidence like a lens. It first navigates from the full document to specific visual elements on relevant pages, then employs a sampling-adjudication mechanism to generate a single, reliable answer. Paired with Gemini-2.5-Pro, DocLens achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBench-Doc and FinRAGBench-V, surpassing even human experts. The framework's superiority is particularly evident on vision-centric and unanswerable queries, demonstrating the power of its enhanced localization capabilities.

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/

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

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

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.

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible but preventable blindness in working age populations. Color fundus photography (CFP) is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. However, its application to glaucoma has been limited to the computation of a few related biomarkers such as the vertical cup-to-disc ratio. Deep learning approaches, although widely applied for medical image analysis, have not been extensively used for glaucoma assessment due to the limited size of the available data sets. Furthermore, the lack of a standardize benchmark strategy makes difficult to compare existing methods in a uniform way. In order to overcome these issues we set up the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge, REFUGE (https://refuge.grand-challenge.org), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2018. The challenge consisted of two primary tasks, namely optic disc/cup segmentation and glaucoma classification. As part of REFUGE, we have publicly released a data set of 1200 fundus images with ground truth segmentations and clinical glaucoma labels, currently the largest existing one. We have also built an evaluation framework to ease and ensure fairness in the comparison of different models, encouraging the development of novel techniques in the field. 12 teams qualified and participated in the online challenge. This paper summarizes their methods and analyzes their corresponding results. In particular, we observed that two of the top-ranked teams outperformed two human experts in the glaucoma classification task. Furthermore, the segmentation results were in general consistent with the ground truth annotations, with complementary outcomes that can be further exploited by ensembling the results.

We introduce VLM-Lens, a toolkit designed to enable systematic benchmarking, analysis, and interpretation of vision-language models (VLMs) by supporting the extraction of intermediate outputs from any layer during the forward pass of open-source VLMs. VLM-Lens provides a unified, YAML-configurable interface that abstracts away model-specific complexities and supports user-friendly operation across diverse VLMs. It currently supports 16 state-of-the-art base VLMs and their over 30 variants, and is extensible to accommodate new models without changing the core logic. The toolkit integrates easily with various interpretability and analysis methods. We demonstrate its usage with two simple analytical experiments, revealing systematic differences in the hidden representations of VLMs across layers and target concepts. VLM-Lens is released as an open-sourced project to accelerate community efforts in understanding and improving VLMs.

We present SPAD, a novel approach for creating consistent multi-view images from text prompts or single images. To enable multi-view generation, we repurpose a pretrained 2D diffusion model by extending its self-attention layers with cross-view interactions, and fine-tune it on a high quality subset of Objaverse. We find that a naive extension of the self-attention proposed in prior work (e.g. MVDream) leads to content copying between views. Therefore, we explicitly constrain the cross-view attention based on epipolar geometry. To further enhance 3D consistency, we utilize Plucker coordinates derived from camera rays and inject them as positional encoding. This enables SPAD to reason over spatial proximity in 3D well. In contrast to recent works that can only generate views at fixed azimuth and elevation, SPAD offers full camera control and achieves state-of-the-art results in novel view synthesis on unseen objects from the Objaverse and Google Scanned Objects datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that text-to-3D generation using SPAD prevents the multi-face Janus issue. See more details at our webpage: https://yashkant.github.io/spad

The reflective nature of the human eye is an underappreciated source of information about what the world around us looks like. By imaging the eyes of a moving person, we can collect multiple views of a scene outside the camera's direct line of sight through the reflections in the eyes. In this paper, we reconstruct a 3D scene beyond the camera's line of sight using portrait images containing eye reflections. This task is challenging due to 1) the difficulty of accurately estimating eye poses and 2) the entangled appearance of the eye iris and the scene reflections. Our method jointly refines the cornea poses, the radiance field depicting the scene, and the observer's eye iris texture. We further propose a simple regularization prior on the iris texture pattern to improve reconstruction quality. Through various experiments on synthetic and real-world captures featuring people with varied eye colors, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to recover 3D scenes using eye reflections.

Large diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

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.

We propose LENS, a modular approach for tackling computer vision problems by leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs). Our system uses a language model to reason over outputs from a set of independent and highly descriptive vision modules that provide exhaustive information about an image. We evaluate the approach on pure computer vision settings such as zero- and few-shot object recognition, as well as on vision and language problems. LENS can be applied to any off-the-shelf LLM and we find that the LLMs with LENS perform highly competitively with much bigger and much more sophisticated systems, without any multimodal training whatsoever. We open-source our code at https://github.com/ContextualAI/lens and provide an interactive demo.

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.

Depth-of-field control is essential in photography, but getting the perfect focus often takes several tries or special equipment. Single-image refocusing is still difficult. It involves recovering sharp content and creating realistic bokeh. Current methods have significant drawbacks. They need all-in-focus inputs, depend on synthetic data from simulators, and have limited control over aperture. We introduce Generative Refocusing, a two-step process that uses DeblurNet to recover all-in-focus images from various inputs and BokehNet for creating controllable bokeh. Our main innovation is semi-supervised training. This method combines synthetic paired data with unpaired real bokeh images, using EXIF metadata to capture real optical characteristics beyond what simulators can provide. Our experiments show we achieve top performance in defocus deblurring, bokeh synthesis, and refocusing benchmarks. Additionally, our Generative Refocusing allows text-guided adjustments and custom aperture shapes.

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.

Recent diffusion-based image editing methods commonly rely on text or high-level instructions to guide the generation process, offering intuitive but coarse control. In contrast, we focus on explicit, prompt-free editing, where the user directly specifies the modification by cropping and pasting an object or sub-object into a chosen location within an image. This operation affords precise spatial and visual control, yet it introduces a fundamental challenge: preserving the identity of the pasted object while harmonizing it with its new context. We observe that attention maps in diffusion-based editing models inherently govern whether image regions are preserved or adapted for coherence. Building on this insight, we introduce LooseRoPE, a saliency-guided modulation of rotational positional encoding (RoPE) that loosens the positional constraints to continuously control the attention field of view. By relaxing RoPE in this manner, our method smoothly steers the model's focus between faithful preservation of the input image and coherent harmonization of the inserted object, enabling a balanced trade-off between identity retention and contextual blending. Our approach provides a flexible and intuitive framework for image editing, achieving seamless compositional results without textual descriptions or complex user input.

Existing vision tokenization isolates the optimization of vision tokenizers from downstream training, implicitly assuming the visual tokens can generalize well across various tasks, e.g., image generation and visual question answering. The vision tokenizer optimized for low-level reconstruction is agnostic to downstream tasks requiring varied representations and semantics. This decoupled paradigm introduces a critical misalignment: The loss of the vision tokenization can be the representation bottleneck for target tasks. For example, errors in tokenizing text in a given image lead to poor results when recognizing or generating them. To address this, we propose ETT, an end-to-end vision tokenizer tuning approach that enables joint optimization between vision tokenization and target autoregressive tasks. Unlike prior autoregressive models that use only discrete indices from a frozen vision tokenizer, ETT leverages the visual embeddings of the tokenizer codebook, and optimizes the vision tokenizers end-to-end with both reconstruction and caption objectives. ETT can be seamlessly integrated into existing training pipelines with minimal architecture modifications. Our ETT is simple to implement and integrate, without the need to adjust the original codebooks or architectures of the employed large language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed end-to-end vision tokenizer tuning unlocks significant performance gains, i.e., 2-6% for multimodal understanding and visual generation tasks compared to frozen tokenizer baselines, while preserving the original reconstruction capability. We hope this very simple and strong method can empower multimodal foundation models besides image generation and understanding.

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques.

Recent works on accelerating Vision-Language Models show that strong performance can be maintained across a variety of vision-language tasks despite highly compressing visual information. In this work, we examine the popular acceleration approach of early pruning of visual tokens inside the language model and find that its strong performance across many tasks is not due to an exceptional ability to compress visual information, but rather the benchmarks' limited ability to assess fine-grained visual capabilities. Namely, we demonstrate a core issue with the acceleration approach where most tokens towards the top of the image are pruned away. Yet, this issue is only reflected in performance for a small subset of tasks such as localization. For the other evaluated tasks, strong performance is maintained with the flawed pruning strategy. Noting the limited visual capabilities of the studied acceleration technique, we propose FEATHER (Fast and Effective Acceleration wiTH Ensemble cRiteria), a straightforward approach that (1) resolves the identified issue with early-layer pruning, (2) incorporates uniform sampling to ensure coverage across all image regions, and (3) applies pruning in two stages to allow the criteria to become more effective at a later layer while still achieving significant speedup through early-layer pruning. With comparable computational savings, we find that FEATHER has more than 5times performance improvement on the vision-centric localization benchmarks compared to the original acceleration approach.

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.

In this work, we study the Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model. Redundant vision tokens consume a significant amount of computational memory and resources. Therefore, many previous works compress them in the Vision Projector to reduce the number of vision tokens. However, simply compressing in the Vision Projector can lead to the loss of visual information, especially for tasks that rely on fine-grained spatial relationships, such as OCR and Chart \& Table Understanding. To address this problem, we propose Vision Remember, which is inserted between the LLM decoder layers to allow vision tokens to re-memorize vision features. Specifically, we retain multi-level vision features and resample them with the vision tokens that have interacted with the text token. During the resampling process, each vision token only attends to a local region in vision features, which is referred to as saliency-enhancing local attention. Saliency-enhancing local attention not only improves computational efficiency but also captures more fine-grained contextual information and spatial relationships within the region. Comprehensive experiments on multiple visual understanding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method when combined with various Efficient Vision Projectors, showing performance gains without sacrificing efficiency. Based on Vision Remember, LLaVA-VR with only 2B parameters is also superior to previous representative MLLMs such as Tokenpacker-HD-7B and DeepSeek-VL-7B.

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

In this paper, we address the challenge of decomposing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) into objects from an open vocabulary, a critical task for object manipulation in 3D reconstruction and view synthesis. Current techniques for NeRF decomposition involve a trade-off between the flexibility of processing open-vocabulary queries and the accuracy of 3D segmentation. We present, Open-vocabulary Embedded Neural Radiance Fields (Open-NeRF), that leverage large-scale, off-the-shelf, segmentation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and introduce an integrate-and-distill paradigm with hierarchical embeddings to achieve both the flexibility of open-vocabulary querying and 3D segmentation accuracy. Open-NeRF first utilizes large-scale foundation models to generate hierarchical 2D mask proposals from varying viewpoints. These proposals are then aligned via tracking approaches and integrated within the 3D space and subsequently distilled into the 3D field. This process ensures consistent recognition and granularity of objects from different viewpoints, even in challenging scenarios involving occlusion and indistinct features. Our experimental results show that the proposed Open-NeRF outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as LERF lerf and FFD ffd in open-vocabulary scenarios. Open-NeRF offers a promising solution to NeRF decomposition, guided by open-vocabulary queries, enabling novel applications in robotics and vision-language interaction in open-world 3D scenes.

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

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

A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in computer vision. However, a limited number of annotated data is very common, especially in ophthalmic image analysis, since manual annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods bring huge opportunities for better utilizing unlabeled data, as they do not need massive annotations. With an attempt to use as many as possible unlabeled ophthalmic images, it is necessary to break the dimension barrier, simultaneously making use of both 2D and 3D images. In this paper, we propose a universal self-supervised Transformer framework, named Uni4Eye, to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding in ophthalmic images. Uni4Eye can serve as a global feature extractor, which builds its basis on a Masked Image Modeling task with a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. We employ a Unified Patch Embedding module to replace the origin patch embedding module in ViT for jointly processing both 2D and 3D input images. Besides, we design a dual-branch multitask decoder module to simultaneously perform two reconstruction tasks on the input image and its gradient map, delivering discriminative representations for better convergence. We evaluate the performance of our pre-trained Uni4Eye encoder by fine-tuning it on six downstream ophthalmic image classification tasks. The superiority of Uni4Eye is successfully established through comparisons to other state-of-the-art SSL pre-training methods.

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light fine-tuning, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains significantly lower perplexity on long-context than RoPE families.

Diffusion-based image editing has made semantic level image manipulation easy for general users, but it also enables realistic local forgeries that are hard to localize. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on the binary detection of generated images or the localization of manually edited regions and do not reflect the properties of diffusion-based edits, which often blend smoothly into the original content. We present Diffusion-Based Image Editing Area Localization Dataset (DEAL-300K), a large scale dataset for diffusion-based image manipulation localization (DIML) with more than 300,000 annotated images. We build DEAL-300K by using a multi-modal large language model to generate editing instructions, a mask-free diffusion editor to produce manipulated images, and an active-learning change detection pipeline to obtain pixel-level annotations. On top of this dataset, we propose a localization framework that uses a frozen Visual Foundation Model (VFM) together with Multi Frequency Prompt Tuning (MFPT) to capture both semantic and frequency-domain cues of edited regions. Trained on DEAL-300K, our method reaches a pixel-level F1 score of 82.56% on our test split and 80.97% on the external CoCoGlide benchmark, providing strong baselines and a practical foundation for future DIML research.The dataset can be accessed via https://github.com/ymhzyj/DEAL-300K.

Vision-language foundation models have shown remarkable performance in various zero-shot settings such as image retrieval, classification, or captioning. But so far, those models seem to fall behind when it comes to zero-shot localization of referential expressions and objects in images. As a result, they need to be fine-tuned for this task. In this paper, we show that pretrained vision-language (VL) models allow for zero-shot open-vocabulary object localization without any fine-tuning. To leverage those capabilities, we propose a Grounding Everything Module (GEM) that generalizes the idea of value-value attention introduced by CLIPSurgery to a self-self attention path. We show that the concept of self-self attention corresponds to clustering, thus enforcing groups of tokens arising from the same object to be similar while preserving the alignment with the language space. To further guide the group formation, we propose a set of regularizations that allows the model to finally generalize across datasets and backbones. We evaluate the proposed GEM framework on various benchmark tasks and datasets for semantic segmentation. It shows that GEM not only outperforms other training-free open-vocabulary localization methods, but also achieves state-of-the-art results on the recently proposed OpenImagesV7 large-scale segmentation benchmark.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in novel view synthesis within 3D environments. However, extracting a radiance field of one specific object from multi-view images encounters substantial challenges due to occlusion and background complexity, thereby presenting difficulties in downstream applications such as NeRF editing and 3D mesh extraction. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose Obj-NeRF, a comprehensive pipeline that recovers the 3D geometry of a specific object from multi-view images using a single prompt. This method combines the 2D segmentation capabilities of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in conjunction with the 3D reconstruction ability of NeRF. Specifically, we first obtain multi-view segmentation for the indicated object using SAM with a single prompt. Then, we use the segmentation images to supervise NeRF construction, integrating several effective techniques. Additionally, we construct a large object-level NeRF dataset containing diverse objects, which can be useful in various downstream tasks. To demonstrate the practicality of our method, we also apply Obj-NeRF to various applications, including object removal, rotation, replacement, and recoloring.

Token-level sparse attention mechanisms, exemplified by DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), achieve fine-grained key selection by scoring every historical token for each query using a lightweight indexer, and then computing attention only over the selected subset. While the downstream sparse attention scales efficiently, the indexer still scans the entire prefix for every query, introducing an O(L^2) per-layer bottleneck that becomes prohibitive as context length grows. We propose HISA (Hierarchical Indexed Sparse Attention), a drop-in replacement for the indexer that transforms the search process from a flat token scan into a two-stage hierarchical procedure. First, a block-level coarse filter scores pooled block representatives to prune irrelevant regions. Then, a token-level refinement applies the original indexer only within the remaining candidate blocks. HISA preserves the exact token-level top-k sparsity pattern required by the downstream Sparse MLA operator and requires no additional training. On kernel-level benchmarks, HISA achieves a 2times speedup at 32K context length and 4times at 128K. On Needle-in-a-Haystack and LongBench, we directly replace the indexer in DeepSeek-V3.2 with HISA, without any fine-tuning. HISA closely matches the original DSA in quality while significantly outperforming block-sparse baselines. Moreover, the token selection sets produced by HISA and the original DSA exhibit a mean IoU greater than 99%, indicating that the efficiency gains come with virtually no impact on selection fidelity.

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.

Recent advances in vision-language models like Stable Diffusion have shown remarkable power in creative image synthesis and editing.However, most existing text-to-image editing methods encounter two obstacles: First, the text prompt needs to be carefully crafted to achieve good results, which is not intuitive or user-friendly. Second, they are insensitive to local edits and can irreversibly affect non-edited regions, leaving obvious editing traces. To tackle these problems, we propose a Zero-shot instructiON-guided local image Editing approach, termed ZONE. We first convert the editing intent from the user-provided instruction (e.g., "make his tie blue") into specific image editing regions through InstructPix2Pix. We then propose a Region-IoU scheme for precise image layer extraction from an off-the-shelf segment model. We further develop an edge smoother based on FFT for seamless blending between the layer and the image.Our method allows for arbitrary manipulation of a specific region with a single instruction while preserving the rest. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ZONE achieves remarkable local editing results and user-friendliness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lsl001006/ZONE.

We introduce a novel visual tokenization framework that embeds a provable PCA-like structure into the latent token space. While existing visual tokenizers primarily optimize for reconstruction fidelity, they often neglect the structural properties of the latent space -- a critical factor for both interpretability and downstream tasks. Our method generates a 1D causal token sequence for images, where each successive token contributes non-overlapping information with mathematically guaranteed decreasing explained variance, analogous to principal component analysis. This structural constraint ensures the tokenizer extracts the most salient visual features first, with each subsequent token adding diminishing yet complementary information. Additionally, we identified and resolved a semantic-spectrum coupling effect that causes the unwanted entanglement of high-level semantic content and low-level spectral details in the tokens by leveraging a diffusion decoder. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and enables better interpretability to align with the human vision system. Moreover, auto-regressive models trained on our token sequences achieve performance comparable to current state-of-the-art methods while requiring fewer tokens for training and inference.

The rapid development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has spurred efforts to adapt these models for interpreting 3D scenes. However, the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. To address this issue, typical approaches focus on injecting 3D awareness into 2D LMMs by designing 3D input-level scene representations. This work provides a new perspective. We introduce reconstructive visual instruction tuning with 3D-awareness (Ross3D), which integrates 3D-aware visual supervision into the training procedure. Specifically, it incorporates cross-view and global-view reconstruction. The former requires reconstructing masked views by aggregating overlapping information from other views. The latter aims to aggregate information from all available views to recover Bird's-Eye-View images, contributing to a comprehensive overview of the entire scene. Empirically, Ross3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across various 3D scene understanding benchmarks. More importantly, our semi-supervised experiments demonstrate significant potential in leveraging large amounts of unlabeled 3D vision-only data.

The need for improved diagnostic methods in ophthalmology is acute, especially in the underdeveloped regions with limited access to specialists and advanced equipment. Therefore, we introduce VisionUnite, a novel vision-language foundation model for ophthalmology enhanced with clinical knowledge. VisionUnite has been pretrained on an extensive dataset comprising 1.24 million image-text pairs, and further refined using our proposed MMFundus dataset, which includes 296,379 high-quality fundus image-text pairs and 889,137 simulated doctor-patient dialogue instances. Our experiments indicate that VisionUnite outperforms existing generative foundation models such as GPT-4V and Gemini Pro. It also demonstrates diagnostic capabilities comparable to junior ophthalmologists. VisionUnite performs well in various clinical scenarios including open-ended multi-disease diagnosis, clinical explanation, and patient interaction, making it a highly versatile tool for initial ophthalmic disease screening. VisionUnite can also serve as an educational aid for junior ophthalmologists, accelerating their acquisition of knowledge regarding both common and underrepresented ophthalmic conditions. VisionUnite represents a significant advancement in ophthalmology, with broad implications for diagnostics, medical education, and understanding of disease mechanisms. The source code is at https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/VisionUnite.

Block-sparse attention is promising for accelerating long-context LLM pre-filling, yet identifying relevant blocks efficiently remains a bottleneck. Existing methods typically employ coarse-grained attention as a proxy for block importance estimation, but often resort to expensive token-level searching or scoring, resulting in significant selection overhead. In this work, we trace the inaccuracy of standard coarse-grained attention via mean pooling to a theoretical root cause: the interaction between mean pooling and Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE). We prove that mean pooling acts as a low-pass filter that induces destructive interference in high-frequency dimensions, effectively creating a "blind spot" for local positional information (e.g., slash patterns). To address this, we introduce Prism, a training-free spectral-aware approach that decomposes block selection into high-frequency and low-frequency branches. By applying energy-based temperature calibration, Prism restores the attenuated positional signals directly from pooled representations, enabling block importance estimation using purely block-level operations, thereby improving efficiency. Extensive evaluations confirm that Prism maintains accuracy parity with full attention while delivering up to 5.1times speedup.

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

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require high-resolution visual information to perform fine-grained perception, yet processing entire high-resolution images is computationally prohibitive. While recent methods leverage a Region-of-Interest (RoI) mechanism to focus on salient areas, they typically present a difficult trade-off: training-based approaches depend on large-scale annotated datasets, while training-free methods that utilize the model's internal attention are computationally inefficient and less accurate, requiring either multi-pass prefill stages or reliance on the slow auto-regressive decoding process. In this paper, we propose an efficient, annotation-free Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) that resolves this trade-off. The SD-RPN is built around a pipeline that transforms the noisy attention maps from the MLLM's middle layers into high-quality pseudo-RoI labels by explicitly denoising the signal and resolving ambiguity. We use these labels to train a lightweight Region Proposal Network (RPN) that learns a more precise localization. This RPN is also highly efficient, predicting the RoI in a single forward pass using features from the MLLM's middle layers, decoupling RoI identification from the auto-regressive generation and avoiding costly multi-pass operations.To validate our approach, we integrate the framework into the LLaVA-1.5 architecture. Despite being trained on only a few (e.g. 10K) question-answer pairs, our method demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and generalization, achieving over a 10% absolute accuracy improvement on unseen benchmarks, including TextVQA, DocVQA, and V-Star. Our work presents a practical and scalable solution for enhancing the fine-grained perception of MLLMs without requiring costly supervision or full model fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/SD-RPN.

Our research is motivated by the urgent global issue of a large population affected by retinal diseases, which are evenly distributed but underserved by specialized medical expertise, particularly in non-urban areas. Our primary objective is to bridge this healthcare gap by developing a comprehensive diagnostic system capable of accurately predicting retinal diseases solely from fundus images. However, we faced significant challenges due to limited, diverse datasets and imbalanced class distributions. To overcome these issues, we have devised innovative strategies. Our research introduces novel approaches, utilizing hybrid models combining deeper Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformer encoders, and ensemble architectures sequentially and in parallel to classify retinal fundus images into 20 disease labels. Our overarching goal is to assess these advanced models' potential in practical applications, with a strong focus on enhancing retinal disease diagnosis accuracy across a broader spectrum of conditions. Importantly, our efforts have surpassed baseline model results, with the C-Tran ensemble model emerging as the leader, achieving a remarkable model score of 0.9166, surpassing the baseline score of 0.9. Additionally, experiments with the IEViT model showcased equally promising outcomes with improved computational efficiency. We've also demonstrated the effectiveness of dynamic patch extraction and the integration of domain knowledge in computer vision tasks. In summary, our research strives to contribute significantly to retinal disease diagnosis, addressing the critical need for accessible healthcare solutions in underserved regions while aiming for comprehensive and accurate disease prediction.

We analyze transformers from the perspective of iterative inference, seeking to understand how model predictions are refined layer by layer. To do so, we train an affine probe for each block in a frozen pretrained model, making it possible to decode every hidden state into a distribution over the vocabulary. Our method, the tuned lens, is a refinement of the earlier "logit lens" technique, which yielded useful insights but is often brittle. We test our method on various autoregressive language models with up to 20B parameters, showing it to be more predictive, reliable and unbiased than the logit lens. With causal experiments, we show the tuned lens uses similar features to the model itself. We also find the trajectory of latent predictions can be used to detect malicious inputs with high accuracy. All code needed to reproduce our results can be found at https://github.com/AlignmentResearch/tuned-lens.