{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/predicting-human-scanpaths-in-visual-question","title":"Predicting Human Scanpaths in Visual Question Answering","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-06-19","proceeding":"CVPR 2021 1","authors":["Xianyu Chen","Ming Jiang","Qi Zhao"],"abstract":"    Attention has been an important mechanism for both humans and computer vision systems. While state-of-the-art models to predict attention focus on estimating a static probabilistic saliency map with free-viewing behavior, real-life scenarios are filled with tasks of varying types and complexities, and visual exploration is a temporal process that contributes to task performance. To bridge the gap, we conduct a first study to understand and predict the temporal sequences of eye fixations (a.k.a. scanpaths) during performing general tasks, and examine how scanpaths affect task performance. We present a new deep reinforcement learning method to predict scanpaths leading to different performances in visual question answering. Conditioned on a task guidance map, the proposed model learns question-specific attention patterns to generate scanpaths. It addresses the exposure bias in scanpath prediction with self-critical sequence training and designs a Consistency-Divergence loss to generate distinguishable scanpaths between correct and incorrect answers. The proposed model not only accurately predicts the spatio-temporal patterns of human behavior in visual question answering, such as fixation position, duration, and order, but also generalizes to free-viewing and visual search tasks, achieving human-level performance in all tasks and significantly outperforming the state of the art.    ","url_abs":"http://openaccess.thecvf.com//content/CVPR2021/html/Chen_Predicting_Human_Scanpaths_in_Visual_Question_Answering_CVPR_2021_paper.html","url_pdf":"http://openaccess.thecvf.com//content/CVPR2021/papers/Chen_Predicting_Human_Scanpaths_in_Visual_Question_Answering_CVPR_2021_paper.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"predicting-human-scanpaths-in-visual-question","repo_url":"https://github.com/chenxy99/Scanpaths","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"scanpath-prediction","task_name":"Scanpath prediction"},{"task_slug":"temporal-sequences","task_name":"Temporal Sequences"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}