# MambaPupil: Bidirectional Selective Recurrent model for Event-based Eye tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12083/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10088/) (2019)
- [State Space Models for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15584/) (2024)
- [Masked Event Modeling: Self-Supervised Pretraining for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10368/) (2022)
- [One-Shot Object Affordance Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03658/) (2021)
- [3ET: Efficient Event-based Eye Tracking using a Change-Based ConvLSTM Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11771/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Appearance-Based Methods and Implications for Gaze-Based Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10906/) (2019)
- [Recurrent CNN for 3D Gaze Estimation using Appearance and Shape Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03064/) (2018)
- [Event-Based Eye Tracking. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11770/) (2024)
- [Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12943/) (2023)
- [TinyTracker: Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Low-Power Edge Vision In-Sensor for Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07813/) (2023)
- [Bina-Rep Event Frames: a Simple and Effective Representation for Event-based cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13662/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [FACET: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Eye Tracking Using Ellipse Modeling for Extended Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15584/) (2024)
- [AC-MAMBASEG: An adaptive convolution and Mamba-based architecture for enhanced skin lesion segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03011/) (2024)
- [Exploring Temporal Dynamics in Event-based Eye Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23725/) (2025)
- [Event-based Facial Keypoint Alignment via Cross-Modal Fusion Attention and Self-Supervised Multi-Event Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24968/) (2025)
- [JaneEye: A 12-nm 2K-FPS 18.9-μJ/Frame Event-based Eye Tracking Accelerator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01213/) (2025)
- [Inference-Time Gaze Refinement for Micro-Expression Recognition: Enhancing Event-Based Eye Tracking with Motion-Aware Post-Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12524/) (2025)
- [Neuromorphic Eye Tracking for Low-Latency Pupil Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09969/) (2025)
- [EveLoad: Cognitive Workload Recognition from Event-Based Eye Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25177/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event-based eye tracking has shown great promise with the high temporal resolution and low redundancy provided by the event camera. However, the diversity and abruptness of eye movement patterns, including blinking, fixating, saccades, and smooth pursuit, pose significant challenges for eye localization. To achieve a stable event-based eye-tracking system, this paper proposes a bidirectional long-term sequence modeling and time-varying state selection mechanism to fully utilize contextual temporal information in response to the variability of eye movements. Specifically, the MambaPupil network is proposed, which consists of the multi-layer convolutional encoder to extract features from the event representations, a bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and a Linear Time-Varying State Space Module (LTV-SSM), to selectively capture contextual correlation from the forward and backward temporal relationship. Furthermore, the Bina-rep is utilized as a compact event representation, and the tailor-made data augmentation, called as Event-Cutout, is proposed to enhance the model's robustness by applying spatial random masking to the event image. The evaluation on the ThreeET-plus benchmark shows the superior performance of the MambaPupil, which secured the 1st place in CVPR'2024 AIS Event-based Eye Tracking challenge.