# Differential Contrastive Training for Gaze Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20128 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20128/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Gated Multimodal Units for Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01992/) (2017)
- [ZegCLIP: Towards Adapting CLIP for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03588/) (2022)
- [Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10088/) (2019)
- [Eye Tracking for Everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05814/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CLIP the Gap: A Single Domain Generalization Approach for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05499/) (2023)
- [Can Language Understand Depth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01077/) (2022)
- [Gaze Estimation using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14424/) (2021)
- [A Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive Network for Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00187/) (2020)
- [PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13173/) (2021)
- [Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation Using Dilated-Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07296/) (2019)
- [Generalizing Gaze Estimation with Outlier-guided Collaborative Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13780/) (2021)
- [WorDepth: Variational Language Prior for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03635/) (2024)
- [DeepWarp: Photorealistic Image Resynthesis for Gaze Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07215/) (2016)
- [Domain Adaptation Gaze Estimation by Embedding with Prediction Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07526/) (2020)
- [Gaze-Contingent Ocular Parallax Rendering for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09740/) (2019)
- [Teach CLIP to Develop a Number Sense for Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03574/) (2024)
- [What Do You See in Vehicle? Comprehensive Vision Solution for In-Vehicle Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15664/) (2024)
- [CLIP-Gaze: Towards General Gaze Estimation via Visual-Linguistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05124/) (2024)
- [Unseen No More: Unlocking the Potential of CLIP for Generative Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05974/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Real-time Appearance-based Gaze Estimation for Open Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26945/) (2026)
- [GMGaze: MoE-Based Context-Aware Gaze Estimation with CLIP and Multiscale Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00799/) (2026)
- [From Gaze to Meaning: A Training-Free AI Agent for Unified Grounding and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06208/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The complex application scenarios have raised critical requirements for precise and generalizable gaze estimation methods. Recently, the pre-trained CLIP has achieved remarkable performance on various vision tasks, but its potentials have not been fully exploited in gaze estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel Differential Contrastive Training strategy, which boosts gaze estimation performance with the help of the CLIP. Accordingly, a Differential Contrastive Gaze Estimation network (DCGaze) composed of a Visual Appearance-aware branch and a Semantic Differential-aware branch is introduced. The Visual Appearance-aware branch is essentially a primary gaze estimation network and it incorporates an Adaptive Feature-refinement Unit (AFU) and a Double-head Gaze Regressor (DGR), which both help the primary network to extract informative and gaze-related appearance features. Moreover, the Semantic Difference-aware branch is designed on the basis of the CLIP's text encoder to reveal the semantic difference of gazes. This branch could further empower the Visual Appearance-aware branch with the capability of characterizing the gaze-related semantic information. Extensive experimental results on four challenging datasets over within and cross-domain tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our DCGaze.The code is available at https://github.com/LinZhang-bjtu/DCGaze.