arXiv · 2607.20072
Factor-Informed Uncertainty Distillation for Gaze Estimation
Abstract
Deep gaze estimation works well in controlled capture but degrades in unconstrained settings, where systems must reject unreliable predictions. Single-pass uncertainty (e.g., heteroscedastic regression) infers uncertainty from pixels without explicit input-validity cues, while sampling based methods are often too costly for real time use. We propose Factor-Informed Uncertainty Distillation (FIUD), a teacher-student framework that aligns uncertainty with interpretable image-quality failure modes. A gradient-boosting teacher predicts expected gaze error from factors such as illumination, sharpness, eye visibility and symmetry; a neural student distills these signals via curriculum learning and ranking supervision into a lightweight single-pass uncertainty head. Across ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, and MPIIFaceGaze (>300k samples), FIUD improves uncertainty, error rank correlation and selective prediction versus deterministic and sampling-based baselines, with the largest gains in unconstrained settings.
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Mohammadreza Jamalifard, Yaxiong Lei, Javier Fumanal Idocin, Parastoo Azizinezhad, Tom Foulsham, Javier Andreu-Perez. 2026-07-22. Factor-Informed Uncertainty Distillation for Gaze Estimation. https://doi.org/10.1145/3797246.3803050
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