Awesome

Human Visual Attention

This repository contains a curated list of research papers and resources focusing on saliency and scanpath prediction, human attention, human visual search.

❗ Latest Update: 3 December 2024. ❗This repo is a work in progress. New updates coming soon, stay tuned!! :construction:

📣 Latest News 📣

• 20 April 2024 Our survey paper has been accepted for publication at IJCAI2024 Survey Track!

Our Survey on Human Visual Attention 👀

🔥🔥 Trends, Applications, and Challenges in Human Attention Modelling 🔥🔥

Authors: Giuseppe Cartella, Marcella Cornia, Vittorio Cuculo, Alessandro D'Amelio, Dario Zanca, Giuseppe Boccignone, Rita Cucchiara

📚 Table of Contents

• Human Attention Modelling

  • <details> <summary>Saliency Prediction</summary>

    Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
    2025	WACV	SUM: Saliency Unification through Mamba for Visual Attention Modeling	Alireza Hosseini et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat: / Project Page
    2024	WACV	Learning Saliency from Fixations	Yasser Abdelaziz Dahou Djilali et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2023	CVPR	Learning from Unique Perspectives: User-aware Saliency Modeling	Shi Chen et al.	📜 Paper
    2023	CVPR	TempSAL - Uncovering Temporal Information for Deep Saliency Prediction	Bahar Aydemir et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2023	BMVC	Clustered Saliency Prediction	Rezvan Sherkat et al.	📜 Paper
    2023	NeurIPS	What Do Deep Saliency Models Learn about Visual Attention?	Shi Chen et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2022	Neurocomputing	TranSalNet: Towards perceptually relevant visual saliency prediction	Jianxun Lou et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2020	CVPR	STAViS: Spatio-Temporal AudioVisual Saliency Network	Antigoni Tsiami et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2020	CVPR	How much time do you have? Modeling multi-duration saliency	Camilo Fosco et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat: / Project Page
    2018	IEEE Transactions on Image Processing	Predicting Human Eye Fixations via an LSTM-based Saliency Attentive Model	Marcella Cornia et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2015	CVPR	SALICON: Saliency in Context	Ming Jiang et al.	📜 Paper / Project Page
    2009	ICCV	Learning to Predict Where Humans Look	Tilke Judd et al.	📜 Paper
    1998	TPAMI	A Model of Saliency-Based Visual Attention for Rapid Scene Analysis	Laurent Itti et al.	📜 Paper

  </details>
  • <details> <summary>Scanpath Prediction</summary>

    Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
    2025	WACV	TPP-Gaze: Modelling Gaze Dynamics in Space and Time with Neural Temporal Point Processes	Alessandro D'Amelio et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2024	ECCV	GazeXplain: Learning to Predict Natural Language Explanations of Visual Scanpaths	Xianyu Chen et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2024	ECCV	Look Hear: Gaze Prediction for Speech-directed Human Attention	Sounak Mondal et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2024	CVPR	Beyond Average: Individualized Visual Scanpath Prediction	Xianyu Chen et al.	📜 Paper
    2024	CVPR	Unifying Top-down and Bottom-up Scanpath Prediction Using Transformers	Zhibo Yang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2023	arXiv	Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained Models are Zero-Shot Human Scanpath Predictors	Dario Zanca et al.	📜 Paper / Code + Dataset :octocat:
    2023	CVPR	Gazeformer: Scalable, Effective and Fast Prediction of Goal-Directed Human Attention	Sounak Mondal et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2022	ECCV	Target-absent Human Attention	Zhibo Yang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2022	TMLR	Behind the Machine's Gaze: Neural Networks with Biologically-inspired Constraints Exhibit Human-like Visual Attention	Leo Schwinn et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2022	Journal of Vision	DeepGaze III: Modeling free-viewing human scanpaths with deep learning	Matthias Kümmerer et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2021	CVPR	Predicting Human Scanpaths in Visual Question Answering	Xianyu Chen et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2019	TPAMI	Gravitational Laws of Focus of Attention	Dario Zanca et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
    2015	Vision Research	Saccadic model of eye movements for free-viewing condition	Olivier Le Meur et al.	📜 Paper

  </details>

• Integrating Human Attention in AI models

  • Image and Video Processing

    • <details> <summary>Visual Recognition</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	IJCV	Joint Learning of Visual-Audio Saliency Prediction and Sound Source Localization on Multi-face Videos	Minglang Qiao et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2022	ECML PKDD	Foveated Neural Computation	Matteo Tiezzi et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2021	WACV	Integrating Human Gaze into Attention for Egocentric Activity Recognition	Kyle Min et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2019	CVPR	Learning Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation through Visual Attention	Wenguan Wang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2019	CVPR	Shifting more attention to video salient object detection	Deng-Ping Fan et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:

      </details>
    • <details> <summary>Graphic Design</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2020	ACM Symposium on UIST (User Interface Software and Technology)	Predicting Visual Importance Across Graphic Design Types	Camilo Fosco et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2020	ACM MobileHCI	Understanding Visual Saliency in Mobile User Interfaces	Luis A. Leiva et al.	📜 Paper
      2017	ACM Symposium on UIST (User Interface Software and Technology)	Learning Visual Importance for Graphic Designs and Data Visualizations	Zoya Bylinskii et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Image Enhancement and Manipulation</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	CVPR	Realistic saliency guided image enhancement	S. Mahdi H. Miangoleh et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat: / Project Page
      2022	CVPR	Deep saliency prior for reducing visual distraction	Kfir Aberman et al.	📜 Paper / Project Page
      2021	CVPR	Saliency-guided image translation	Lai Jiang et al.	📜 Paper
      2017	arXiv	Guiding human gaze with convolutional neural networks	Leon A. Gatys et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Image Quality Assessment</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	CVPR	ScanDMM: A Deep Markov Model of Scanpath Prediction for 360° Images	Xiangjie Sui et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2021	ICCV Workshops	Saliency-Guided Transformer Network combined with Local Embedding for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment	Mengmeng Zhu et al.	📜 Paper
      2019	ACMMM	SGDNet: An End-to-End Saliency-Guided Deep Neural Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment	Sheng Yang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:

    </details>

  • Vision-and-Language Applications

    • <details> <summary>Automatic Captioning</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2020	EMNLP	Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze	Ece Takmaz et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2019	ICCV	Human Attention in Image Captioning: Dataset and Analysis	Sen He et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2018	ACM TOMM	Paying More Attention to Saliency: Image Captioning with Saliency and Context Attention	Marcella Cornia et al.	📜 Paper
      2017	CVPR	Supervising Neural Attention Models for Video Captioning by Human Gaze Data	Youngjae Yu et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2016	arXiv	Seeing with Humans: Gaze-Assisted Neural Image Captioning	Yusuke Sugano et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Visual Question Answering</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	EMNLP	GazeVQA: A Video Question Answering Dataset for Multiview Eye-Gaze Task-Oriented Collaborations	Muhammet Furkan Ilaslan et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2023	CVPR Workshops	Multimodal Integration of Human-Like Attention in Visual Question Answering	Ekta Sood et al.	📜 Paper / Project Page
      2021	CoNLL	VQA-MHUG: A Gaze Dataset to Study Multimodal Neural Attention in Visual Question Answering	Ekta Sood et al.	📜 Paper / Dataset + Project Page
      2020	ECCV	AiR: Attention with Reasoning Capability	Shi Chen et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2018	AAAI	Exploring Human-like Attention Supervision in Visual Question Answering	Tingting Qiao et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2016	EMNLP	Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?	Abhishek Das et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>

  • Language Modelling

    • <details> <summary>Machine Reading Comprehension</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	ACL Workshops	Native Language Prediction from Gaze: a Reproducibility Study	Lina Skerath et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2022	ETRA	Inferring Native and Non-Native Human Reading Comprehension and Subjective Text Difficulty from Scanpaths	David R. Reich et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2017	ACL	Predicting Native Language from Gaze	Yevgeni Berzak et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Natural Language Understanding</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	EMNLP	Pre-Trained Language Models Augmented with Synthetic Scanpaths for Natural Language Understanding	Shuwen Deng et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2023	EACL	Synthesizing Human Gaze Feedback for Improved NLP Performance	Varun Khurana et al.	📜 Paper
      2020	NeurIPS	Improving Natural Language Processing Tasks with Human Gaze-Guided Neural Attention	Ekta Sood et al.	📜 Paper / Project Page

    </details>

  • Domain-Specific Applications

    • <details> <summary>Robotics</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	IEEE RA-L	GVGNet: Gaze-Directed Visual Grounding for Learning Under-Specified Object Referring Intention	Kun Qian et al.	📜 Paper
      2022	RSS	Gaze Complements Control Input for Goal Prediction During Assisted Teleoperation	Reuben M. Aronson et al.	📜 Paper
      2019	CoRL	Understanding Teacher Gaze Patterns for Robot Learning	Akanksha Saran et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2019	CoRL	Nonverbal Robot Feedback for Human Teachers	Sandy H. Huang et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Autonomous Driving</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2023	ICCV	FBLNet: FeedBack Loop Network for Driver Attention Prediction	Yilong Chen et al.	📜 Paper
      2022	IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems	DADA: Driver Attention Prediction in Driving Accident Scenarios	Jianwu Fang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2021	ICCV	MEDIRL: Predicting the Visual Attention of Drivers via Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning	Sonia Baee et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat: / Project Page
      2020	CVPR	“Looking at the right stuff” - Guided semantic-gaze for autonomous driving	Anwesan Pal et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2019	ITSC	DADA-2000: Can Driving Accident be Predicted by Driver Attention? Analyzed by A Benchmark	Jianwu Fang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2018	ACCV	Predicting Driver Attention in Critical Situations	Ye Xia et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2018	TPAMI	Predicting the Driver’s Focus of Attention: the DR(eye)VE Project	Andrea Palazzi et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:

    </details>
    • <details> <summary>Medicine</summary>

      Year	Conference / Journal	Title	Authors	Links
      2024	MICCAI	Weakly-supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Gaze Annotations	Yuan Zhong et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2024	AAAI	Mining Gaze for Contrastive Learning toward Computer-Assisted Diagnosis	Zihao Zhao et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2024	WACV	GazeGNN: A Gaze-Guided Graph Neural Network for Chest X-ray Classification	Bin Wang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2023	WACV	Probabilistic Integration of Object Level Annotations in Chest X-ray Classification	Tom van Sonsbeek et al.	📜 Paper
      2023	IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging	Eye-gaze-guided Vision Transformer for Rectifying Shortcut Learning	Chong Ma et al.	📜 Paper
      2023	Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	Rectify ViT Shortcut Learning by Visual Saliency	Chong Ma et al.	📜 Paper
      2022	IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging	Follow My Eye: Using Gaze to Supervise Computer-Aided Diagnosis	Sheng Wang et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2022	MICCAI	GazeRadar: A Gaze and Radiomics-Guided Disease Localization Framework	Moinak Bhattacharya et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2022	ECCV	RadioTransformer: A Cascaded Global-Focal Transformer for Visual Attention–guided Disease Classification	Moinak Bhattacharya et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2021	Nature Scientific Data	Creation and validation of a chest X-ray dataset with eye-tracking and report dictation for AI development	Alexandros Karargyris et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2021	BMVC	Human Attention in Fine-grained Classification	Yao Rong et al.	📜 Paper / Code :octocat:
      2018	Journal of Medical Imaging	Modeling visual search behavior of breast radiologists using a deep convolution neural network	Suneeta Mall et al.	📜 Paper

    </details>

• Datasets & Benchmarks 📂📎

  • <details> <summary>Datasets</summary>
    • SALICON - SALICON API
    • MIT1003
    • OSIE
    • COCOFreeView
    • COCOSearch18
    • RefCOCO-Gaze
  </details>

How to Contribute 🚀

1. Fork this repository and clone it locally.
2. Create a new branch for your changes: git checkout -b feature-name.
3. Make your changes and commit them: git commit -m 'Description of the changes'.
4. Push to your fork: git push origin feature-name.
5. Open a pull request on the original repository by providing a description of your changes.

This project is in constant development, and we welcome contributions to include the latest research papers in the field or report issues 💥💥.