# Impact of Design Decisions in Scanpath Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PathGAN: Visual Scanpath Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00567/) (2018)
- [Predicting Visual Importance Across Graphic Design Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02912/) (2020)
- [ScanGAN360: A Generative Model of Realistic Scanpaths for 360circ Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13922/) (2021)
- [State-of-the-Art in Human Scanpath Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12239/) (2021)
- [Understanding Visual Saliency in Mobile User Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09176/) (2021)
- [Scanpath Prediction in Panoramic Videos via Expected Code Length Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02536/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ControlGUI: Guiding Generative GUI Exploration through Perceptual Visual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03330/) (2025)
- [A Comparative Study of Scanpath Models in Graph-Based Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24160/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling visual saliency in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allows to understand how people perceive GUI designs and what elements attract their attention. One aspect that is often overlooked is the fact that computational models depend on a series of design parameters that are not straightforward to decide. We systematically analyze how different design parameters affect scanpath evaluation metrics using a state-of-the-art computational model (DeepGaze++). We particularly focus on three design parameters: input image size, inhibition-of-return decay, and masking radius. We show that even small variations of these design parameters have a noticeable impact on standard evaluation metrics such as DTW or Eyenalysis. These effects also occur in other scanpath models, such as UMSS and ScanGAN, and in other datasets such as MASSVIS. Taken together, our results put forward the impact of design decisions for predicting users' viewing behavior on GUIs.