# LISA: Language-guided Interference-aware Spatial-Frequency Attention for Driver Gaze Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17287/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10088/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MPIIGaze: Real-World Dataset and Deep Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09017/) (2017)
- [Appearance-based Gaze Estimation With Deep Learning: A Review and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12668/) (2021)
- [Amplitude-Phase Recombination: Rethinking Robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08487/) (2021)
- [Gaze Estimation using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14424/) (2021)
- [PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13173/) (2021)
- [Generalizing Gaze Estimation with Outlier-guided Collaborative Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13780/) (2021)
- [Gaze-LLE: Gaze Target Estimation via Large-Scale Learned Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09586/) (2024)
- [Gazing Into Missteps: Leveraging Eye-Gaze for Unsupervised Mistake Detection in Egocentric Videos of Skilled Human Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08379/) (2024)
- [What Do You See in Vehicle? Comprehensive Vision Solution for In-Vehicle Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15664/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Attention and Gaussian Processes for Personalized Video Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05215/) (2024)
- [LG-Gaze: Learning Geometry-aware Continuous Prompts for Language-Guided Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08606/) (2024)
- [Enhancing 3D Gaze Estimation in the Wild using Weak Supervision with Gaze Following Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20249/) (2025)
- [FreeGaze: Resource-efficient Gaze Estimation via Frequency Domain Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06692/) (2022)
- [Appearance Debiased Gaze Estimation via Stochastic Subject-Wise Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13865/) (2024)
- [3D Prior is All You Need: Cross-Task Few-shot 2D Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04074/) (2025)
- [GA3CE: Unconstrained 3D Gaze Estimation with Gaze-Aware 3D Context Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10671/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Driver gaze estimation serves as a fundamental metric for evaluating driver attentiveness in modern monitoring systems. Beyond being vulnerable to sudden lighting changes and sensor noise, spatial-domain models struggle to disentangle authentic gaze cues from irrelevant visual attributes. In this paper, we propose LISA, a Language-guided Interference-aware Spatial-Frequency Attention framework that combines frequency-domain priors with vision-language knowledge. Observing that the amplitude spectrum remains relatively stable even under spatial perturbations, we design a dual-domain fusion mechanism. It integrates stable low-frequency semantics into high-frequency details, employing spatial attention to precisely target ocular regions. To reduce semantic ambiguity, we also introduce a training-time disentanglement strategy. Using a frozen CLIP encoder and orthogonal regularization, we explicitly separate gaze features from appearance interference. Experiments on two benchmarks show that LISA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significantly improved robustness against occlusions and lighting variations. The code repository is available at https://github.com/Mason-bupt/LISA.