VL4Gaze: Unleashing Vision-Language Models for Gaze Following

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Shijing, Cui, Chaoqun, Huang, Yaping, Chang, Hyung Jin, Cheng, Yihua
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Shijing
Cui, Chaoqun
Huang, Yaping
Chang, Hyung Jin
Cheng, Yihua
author_facet Wang, Shijing
Cui, Chaoqun
Huang, Yaping
Chang, Hyung Jin
Cheng, Yihua
contents Human gaze provides essential cues for interpreting attention, intention, and social interaction in visual scenes, yet gaze understanding remains largely unexplored in current vision-language models (VLMs). While recent VLMs achieve strong scene-level reasoning across a range of visual tasks, there exists no benchmark that systematically evaluates or trains them for gaze interpretation, leaving open the question of whether gaze understanding can emerge from general-purpose vision-language pre-training. To address this gap, we introduce VL4Gaze, the first large-scale benchmark designed to investigate, evaluate, and unlock the potential of VLMs for gaze understanding. VL4Gaze contains 489K automatically generated question-answer pairs across 124K images and formulates gaze understanding as a unified VQA problem through four complementary tasks: (1) gaze object description, (2) gaze direction description, (3) gaze point location, and (4) ambiguous question recognition. We comprehensively evaluate both commercial and open-source VLMs under in-context learning and fine-tuning settings. The results show that even large-scale VLMs struggle to reliably infer gaze semantics and spatial localization without task-specific supervision. In contrast, training on VL4Gaze brings substantial and consistent improvements across all tasks, highlighting the importance of targeted multi-task supervision for developing gaze understanding capabilities in VLMs. We will release the dataset and code to support further research and development in this direction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VL4Gaze: Unleashing Vision-Language Models for Gaze Following
Wang, Shijing
Cui, Chaoqun
Huang, Yaping
Chang, Hyung Jin
Cheng, Yihua
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human gaze provides essential cues for interpreting attention, intention, and social interaction in visual scenes, yet gaze understanding remains largely unexplored in current vision-language models (VLMs). While recent VLMs achieve strong scene-level reasoning across a range of visual tasks, there exists no benchmark that systematically evaluates or trains them for gaze interpretation, leaving open the question of whether gaze understanding can emerge from general-purpose vision-language pre-training. To address this gap, we introduce VL4Gaze, the first large-scale benchmark designed to investigate, evaluate, and unlock the potential of VLMs for gaze understanding. VL4Gaze contains 489K automatically generated question-answer pairs across 124K images and formulates gaze understanding as a unified VQA problem through four complementary tasks: (1) gaze object description, (2) gaze direction description, (3) gaze point location, and (4) ambiguous question recognition. We comprehensively evaluate both commercial and open-source VLMs under in-context learning and fine-tuning settings. The results show that even large-scale VLMs struggle to reliably infer gaze semantics and spatial localization without task-specific supervision. In contrast, training on VL4Gaze brings substantial and consistent improvements across all tasks, highlighting the importance of targeted multi-task supervision for developing gaze understanding capabilities in VLMs. We will release the dataset and code to support further research and development in this direction.
title VL4Gaze: Unleashing Vision-Language Models for Gaze Following
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20735