# DiffEye: Diffusion-Based Continuous Eye-Tracking Data Generation Conditioned on Natural Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16767 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16767/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 27 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03605/) (2016)
- [FeatUp: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Features at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10516/) (2024)
- [Predicting Human Eye Fixations via an LSTM-based Saliency Attentive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09571/) (2016)
- [Deep Gaze I: Boosting Saliency Prediction with Feature Maps Trained on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1045/) (2014)
- [DeepGaze IIE: Calibrated prediction in and out-of-domain for state-of-the-art saliency modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12441/) (2021)
- [CAT2000: A Large Scale Fixation Dataset for Boosting Saliency Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03581/) (2015)
- [DeepFix: A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for predicting Human Eye Fixations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02927/) (2015)
- [TranSalNet: Towards perceptually relevant visual saliency prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03593/) (2021)
- [Gazeformer: Scalable, Effective and Fast Prediction of Goal-Directed Human Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15274/) (2023)
- [PathGAN: Visual Scanpath Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00567/) (2018)
- [SaltiNet: Scan-path Prediction on 360 Degree Images using Saliency Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03123/) (2017)
- [AiR: Attention with Reasoning Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14419/) (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)
- [Unifying Top-down and Bottom-up Scanpath Prediction Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09383/) (2023)
- [Target-absent Human Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01166/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Saliency Mapping via Probability Distribution Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01793/) (2018)
- [Beyond Average: Individualized Visual Scanpath Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12235/) (2024)
- [SUM: Saliency Unification through Mamba for Visual Attention Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17815/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Infinite Gaze Generation for Videos with Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24938/) (2026)
- [ST-DiffEye: Diffusion-based Continuous Gaze Generation via Joint Scanpath-Trajectory Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15486/) (2026)
- [Attention Capture Is Not Detection: A Two-Stage Account of How Humans Miss Localized AI Image Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13865/) (2026)
- [Diffusion models for eye-gaze trajectory generation using position and velocity representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05522/) (2026)
- [GazeFlow: From Human Gaze Behavior to Generative Egocentric Gaze Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38519/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Numerous models have been developed for scanpath and saliency prediction, which are typically trained on scanpaths, which model eye movement as a sequence of discrete fixation points connected by saccades, while the rich information contained in the raw trajectories is often discarded. Moreover, most existing approaches fail to capture the variability observed among human subjects viewing the same image. They generally predict a single scanpath of fixed, pre-defined length, which conflicts with the inherent diversity and stochastic nature of real-world visual attention. To address these challenges, we propose DiffEye, a diffusion-based training framework designed to model continuous and diverse eye movement trajectories during free viewing of natural images. Our method builds on a diffusion model conditioned on visual stimuli and introduces a novel component, namely Corresponding Positional Embedding (CPE), which aligns spatial gaze information with the patch-based semantic features of the visual input. By leveraging raw eye-tracking trajectories rather than relying on scanpaths, DiffEye captures the inherent variability in human gaze behavior and generates high-quality, realistic eye movement patterns, despite being trained on a comparatively small dataset. The generated trajectories can also be converted into scanpaths and saliency maps, resulting in outputs that more accurately reflect the distribution of human visual attention. DiffEye is the first method to tackle this task on natural images using a diffusion model while fully leveraging the richness of raw eye-tracking data. Our extensive evaluation shows that DiffEye not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in scanpath generation but also enables, for the first time, the generation of continuous eye movement trajectories. Project webpage: https://diff-eye.github.io/