# PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.13173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13173/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10088/) (2019)
- [Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.02863/) (2015)
- [ETH-XGaze: A Large Scale Dataset for Gaze Estimation under Extreme Head Pose and Gaze Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15837/) (2020)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [It's Written All Over Your Face: Full-Face Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08860/) (2016)
- [MPIIGaze: Real-World Dataset and Deep Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09017/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Adaptive Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01941/) (2019)
- [Deep Visual Attention Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02544/) (2017)
- [A Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive Network for Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00187/) (2020)
- [Deep Pictorial Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10002/) (2018)
- [Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation Using Dilated-Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07296/) (2019)
- [Improving Few-Shot User-Specific Gaze Adaptation via Gaze Redirection Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10638/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Feature Fusion Network for Gaze Tracking in Mobile Tablets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11119/) (2021)
- [Self-Learning Transformations for Improving Gaze and Head Redirection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12307/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation Gaze Estimation by Embedding with Prediction Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07526/) (2020)
- [Gaze Estimation for Assisted Living Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09225/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Appearance-based Gaze Estimation With Deep Learning: A Review and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12668/) (2021)
- [Gaze Estimation using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14424/) (2021)
- [Automatic Gaze Analysis: A Survey of Deep Learning based Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05479/) (2021)
- [What Do You See in Vehicle? Comprehensive Vision Solution for In-Vehicle Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15664/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End Review of Gaze Estimation and its Interactive Applications on Handheld Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00122/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Gaze: Towards General Gaze Estimation via Visual-Linguistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05124/) (2024)
- [3DGazeNet: Generalizing Gaze Estimation with Weak-Supervision from Synthetic Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02997/) (2022)
- [Improving Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Consistency Constraints and Signer Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13023/) (2022)
- [NeRF-Gaze: A Head-Eye Redirection Parametric Model for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14710/) (2022)
- [Rotation-Constrained Cross-View Feature Fusion for Multi-View Appearance-based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12704/) (2023)
- [LG-Gaze: Learning Geometry-aware Continuous Prompts for Language-Guided Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08606/) (2024)
- [Enhancing 3D Gaze Estimation in the Wild using Weak Supervision with Gaze Following Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20249/) (2025)
- [LatentGaze: Cross-Domain Gaze Estimation through Gaze-Aware Analytic Latent Code Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10171/) (2022)
- [UniGaze: Towards Universal Gaze Estimation via Large-scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02307/) (2025)
- [Towards Self-Supervised Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10974/) (2022)
- [Jitter Does Matter: Adapting Gaze Estimation to New Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02082/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Gaze Following in Conversational Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05669/) (2023)
- [UVAGaze: Unsupervised 1-to-2 Views Adaptation for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15644/) (2023)
- [HAZE-Net: High-Frequency Attentive Super-Resolved Gaze Estimation in Low-Resolution Face Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10167/) (2022)
- [OmniGaze: Reward-inspired Generalizable Gaze Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13660/) (2025)
- [FR-Net:A Light-weight FFT Residual Net For Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11875/) (2023)
- [Domain-Adaptive Full-Face Gaze Estimation via Novel-View-Synthesis and Feature Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16140/) (2023)
- [Gaze Label Alignment: Alleviating Domain Shift for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15601/) (2024)
- [3D Prior is All You Need: Cross-Task Few-shot 2D Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04074/) (2025)
- [Differential Contrastive Training for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20128/) (2025)
- [MAC-Gaze: Motion-Aware Continual Calibration for Mobile Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22769/) (2025)
- [Investigation of Architectures and Receptive Fields for Appearance-based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09593/) (2023)
- [PCFGaze: Physics-Consistent Feature for Appearance-based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02165/) (2023)
- [Learning Unsupervised Gaze Representation via Eye Mask Driven Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00315/) (2024)
- [Multistream Gaze Estimation with Anatomical Eye Region Isolation by Synthetic to Real Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09256/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gaze estimation methods learn eye gaze from facial features. However, among rich information in the facial image, real gaze-relevant features only correspond to subtle changes in eye region, while other gaze-irrelevant features like illumination, personal appearance and even facial expression may affect the learning in an unexpected way. This is a major reason why existing methods show significant performance degradation in cross-domain/dataset evaluation. In this paper, we tackle the cross-domain problem in gaze estimation. Different from common domain adaption methods, we propose a domain generalization method to improve the cross-domain performance without touching target samples. The domain generalization is realized by gaze feature purification. We eliminate gaze-irrelevant factors such as illumination and identity to improve the cross-domain performance. We design a plug-and-play self-adversarial framework for the gaze feature purification. The framework enhances not only our baseline but also existing gaze estimation methods directly and significantly. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose domain generalization methods in gaze estimation. Our method achieves not only state-of-the-art performance among typical gaze estimation methods but also competitive results among domain adaption methods. The code is released in https://github.com/yihuacheng/PureGaze.