# Detecting Autism Spectrum Disorder with Deep Eye Movement Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05812/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [Evaluation: from precision, recall and F-measure to ROC, informedness, markedness and correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16061/) (2020)
- [Deep Transformer Models for Time Series Forecasting: The Influenza Prevalence Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08317/) (2020)
- [MPTSNet: Integrating Multiscale Periodic Local Patterns and Global Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05582/) (2025)
- [EmMixformer: Mix transformer for eye movement recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04956/) (2024)
- [Detach-ROCKET: Sequential feature selection for time series classification with random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14518/) (2023)
- [Mask the Redundancy: Evolving Masking Representation Learning for Multivariate Time-Series Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17008/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Time Series Classification of Parkinson's Disease Eye Tracking Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16381/) (2023)
- [DE3S: Dual-Enhanced Soft-Sparse-Shape Learning for Medical Early Time-Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12214/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and behavioral patterns. Eye movement data offers a non-invasive diagnostic tool for ASD detection, as it is inherently discrete and exhibits short-term temporal dependencies, reflecting localized gaze focus between fixation points. These characteristics enable the data to provide deeper insights into subtle behavioral markers, distinguishing ASD-related patterns from typical development. Eye movement signals mainly contain short-term and localized dependencies. However, despite the widespread application of stacked attention layers in Transformer-based models for capturing long-range dependencies, our experimental results indicate that this approach yields only limited benefits when applied to eye movement data. This may be because discrete fixation points and short-term dependencies in gaze focus reduce the utility of global attention mechanisms, making them less efficient than architectures focusing on local temporal patterns. To efficiently capture subtle and complex eye movement patterns, distinguishing ASD from typically developing (TD) individuals, a discrete short-term sequential (DSTS) modeling framework is designed with Class-aware Representation and Imbalance-aware Mechanisms. Through extensive experiments on several eye movement datasets, DSTS outperforms both traditional machine learning techniques and more sophisticated deep learning models.