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, DiffEyecaptures 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. DiffEyeis 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 DiffEyenot only achieves state-of-the-art performance in scanpath generation but also enables, for the first time, the generation of continuous eye movement trajectories.

Understanding how humans move their eyes to gather visual information is a central question in neuroscience, cognitive science, and vision research. While recent deep learning (DL) models achieve state-of-the-art performance in predicting human scanpaths, their underlying decision processes remain opaque. At an opposite end of the modeling spectrum, cognitively inspired mechanistic models aim to explain scanpath behavior through interpretable cognitive mechanisms but lag far behind in predictive accuracy. In this work, we bridge this gap by using a high-performing deep model--DeepGaze III--to discover and test mechanisms that improve a leading mechanistic model, SceneWalk. By identifying individual fixations where DeepGaze III succeeds and SceneWalk fails, we isolate behaviorally meaningful discrepancies and use them to motivate targeted extensions of the mechanistic framework. These include time-dependent temperature scaling, saccadic momentum and an adaptive cardinal attention bias: Simple, interpretable additions that substantially boost predictive performance. With these extensions, SceneWalk's explained variance on the MIT1003 dataset doubles from 35% to 70%, setting a new state of the art in mechanistic scanpath prediction. Our findings show how performance-optimized neural networks can serve as tools for cognitive model discovery, offering a new path toward interpretable and high-performing models of visual behavior.

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.

Predicting human eye movements during goal-directed visual search is critical for enhancing interactive AI systems. In medical imaging, such prediction can support radiologists in interpreting complex data, such as chest X-rays. Many existing methods rely on generic vision--language models and saliency-based features, which can limit their ability to capture fine-grained clinical semantics and integrate domain knowledge effectively. We present \textbf{LogitGaze-Med}, a state-of-the-art multimodal transformer framework that unifies (1) domain-specific visual encoders (e.g., CheXNet), (2) textual embeddings of diagnostic labels, and (3) semantic priors extracted via the logit-lens from an instruction-tuned medical vision--language model (LLaVA-Med). By directly predicting continuous fixation coordinates and dwell durations, our model generates clinically meaningful scanpaths. Experiments on the GazeSearch dataset and synthetic scanpaths generated from MIMIC-CXR and validated by experts demonstrate that LogitGaze-Med improves scanpath similarity metrics by 20--30\% over competitive baselines and yields over 5\% gains in downstream pathology classification when incorporating predicted fixations as additional training data.

Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point.

Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets.

Thus, there is a need for a reference point, on which each model canbetested andfrom where potential improvements canbe derived. In this study, we select publicly available state-of-the-art visual search models and datasets in natural scenes, and provide a common framework for their evaluation. To this end, we apply a unified format and criteria, bridging the gaps between them, and we estimate the models' efficiency and similarity with humans using a specific set of metrics.