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Hauptverfasser: Kerkouri, Mohamed Amine, Tliba, Marouane, Wang, Bin, Chetouani, Aladine, Bagci, Ulas, Bruno, Alessandro
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08494
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author Kerkouri, Mohamed Amine
Tliba, Marouane
Wang, Bin
Chetouani, Aladine
Bagci, Ulas
Bruno, Alessandro
author_facet Kerkouri, Mohamed Amine
Tliba, Marouane
Wang, Bin
Chetouani, Aladine
Bagci, Ulas
Bruno, Alessandro
contents Scanpath similarity metrics are central to eye-movement research, yet existing methods predominantly evaluate spatial and temporal alignment while neglecting semantic equivalence between attended image regions. We present a semantic scanpath similarity framework that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) into eye-tracking analysis. Each fixation is encoded under controlled visual context (patch-based and marker-based strategies) and transformed into concise textual descriptions, which are aggregated into scanpath-level representations. Semantic similarity is then computed using embedding-based and lexical NLP metrics and compared against established spatial measures, including MultiMatch and DTW. Experiments on free-viewing eye-tracking data demonstrate that semantic similarity captures partially independent variance from geometric alignment, revealing cases of high content agreement despite spatial divergence. We further analyze the impact of contextual encoding on description fidelity and metric stability. Our findings suggest that multimodal foundation models enable interpretable, content-aware extensions of classical scanpath analysis, providing a complementary dimension for gaze research within the ETRA community.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What They Saw, Not Just Where They Looked: Semantic Scanpath Similarity via VLMs and NLP metric
Kerkouri, Mohamed Amine
Tliba, Marouane
Wang, Bin
Chetouani, Aladine
Bagci, Ulas
Bruno, Alessandro
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Scanpath similarity metrics are central to eye-movement research, yet existing methods predominantly evaluate spatial and temporal alignment while neglecting semantic equivalence between attended image regions. We present a semantic scanpath similarity framework that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) into eye-tracking analysis. Each fixation is encoded under controlled visual context (patch-based and marker-based strategies) and transformed into concise textual descriptions, which are aggregated into scanpath-level representations. Semantic similarity is then computed using embedding-based and lexical NLP metrics and compared against established spatial measures, including MultiMatch and DTW. Experiments on free-viewing eye-tracking data demonstrate that semantic similarity captures partially independent variance from geometric alignment, revealing cases of high content agreement despite spatial divergence. We further analyze the impact of contextual encoding on description fidelity and metric stability. Our findings suggest that multimodal foundation models enable interpretable, content-aware extensions of classical scanpath analysis, providing a complementary dimension for gaze research within the ETRA community.
title What They Saw, Not Just Where They Looked: Semantic Scanpath Similarity via VLMs and NLP metric
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08494