# Diffusion-Refined VQA Annotations for Semi-Supervised Gaze Following

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02774/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Multi-view Gaze Target Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05857/) (2025)
- [OmniGF: A Dual-Branch Vision-Language Framework for Unified Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26399/) (2026)
- [Multi-scale Object-Aware Gaze Estimation via Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29334/) (2026)
- [Gaze Target Estimation Anywhere with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training gaze following models requires a large number of images with gaze target coordinates annotated by human annotators, which is a laborious and inherently ambiguous process. We propose the first semi-supervised method for gaze following by introducing two novel priors to the task. We obtain the first prior using a large pretrained Visual Question Answering (VQA) model, where we compute Grad-CAM heatmaps by `prompting' the VQA model with a gaze following question. These heatmaps can be noisy and not suited for use in training. The need to refine these noisy annotations leads us to incorporate a second prior. We utilize a diffusion model trained on limited human annotations and modify the reverse sampling process to refine the Grad-CAM heatmaps. By tuning the diffusion process we achieve a trade-off between the human annotation prior and the VQA heatmap prior, which retains the useful VQA prior information while exhibiting similar properties to the training data distribution. Our method outperforms simple pseudo-annotation generation baselines on the GazeFollow image dataset. More importantly, our pseudo-annotation strategy, applied to a widely used supervised gaze following model (VAT), reduces the annotation need by 50%. Our method also performs the best on the VideoAttentionTarget dataset.