arXiv subjects

Jean-Marc Odobez

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Marc Odobez.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Eyes on VLM: Benchmarking Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction in Vision Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have rapidly evolved into general-purpose multimodal reasoners with strong zero-shot generalization. In this context, VLMs could greatly benefit the analysis of human gaze and attention, a central task in human behavior understanding that requires reasoning about the physical scene as well as the activity, interactions, and social context. However, the extent to which VLMs can reliably understand human gaze and related attentional behaviors remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present EyeVLM, a systematic evaluation framework for gaze understanding in VLMs across two complementary dimensions: tasks and models. To assess gaze understanding capabilities, we focus on two core tasks. The first, gaze following, i.e., predicting the 2D location where a person is looking, has a geometric and visual processing focus, requiring a precise understanding of the human face, attention direction, 3D scene structure, and spatial grounding of attended targets. The second, social gaze prediction, requires social and relational reasoning over multi-person interactions (e.g., mutual gaze and shared attention), and may benefit more from the LLM semantic reasoning capabilities within VLMs. Regarding models, EyeVLM evaluates these tasks in two ways: a zero-shot setting with a diverse set of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs, exploring different prompting strategies; and a fine-tuning approach based on task-specific QA pairs, studying the impact of model scale and data scale. As benchmarks, we rely on existing gaze understanding datasets and perform a systematic comparison with state-of-the-art purely visual models. Overall, our results show that current VLMs lack precise gaze understanding capabilities. While standard training helps reduce the gap with visual models, significant improvements are still needed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Micro-Expression-Aware Avatar Fingerprinting via Inter-Frame Feature Differencing

Avatar fingerprinting, i.e., verifying who drives a synthetic talking-head video rather than whether it is real, is a critical safeguard for authorized use of face-reenactment technology. Existing methods rely on a fixed, non-differentiable landmark extraction stage that prevents the fingerprinting model from being optimized end-to-end from raw pixels. We propose a preprocessing-free system built on a micro-expression-aware backbone operating on raw video frames, with inter-frame feature differencing as the core design principle: consecutive feature maps are subtracted in the learned deep feature space, so that temporally stable appearance dimensions contribute zero to the output while driver-specific motion dynamics are preserved. A controlled ablation on NVFAIR confirms that temporal motion accounts for the large majority of discriminative performance, and that raw appearance features actively degrade identity separation. Both the choice of backbone and the differencing principle are essential: differencing alone is insufficient when applied to a generic encoder, as appearance-dominated features collapse to near-identical representations across adjacent frames, while the micro-expression-aware F5C backbone retains measurable motion variation that the differencing operation can exploit. Without any external preprocessing, our model achieves an overall AUC of 0.877 on NVFAIR and matches or exceeds the landmark-based baseline on the majority of cross-generator pairs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

End-to-End Shared Attention Estimation via Group Detection with Feedback Refinement

This paper proposes an end-to-end shared attention estimation method via group detection. Most previous methods estimate shared attention (SA) without detecting the actual group of people focusing on it, or assume that there is a single SA point in a given image. These issues limit the applicability of SA detection in practice and impact performance. To address them, we propose to simultaneously achieve group detection and shared attention estimation using a two step process: (i) the generation of SA heatmaps relying on individual gaze attention heatmaps and group membership scalars estimated in a group inference; (ii) a refinement of the initial group memberships allowing to account for the initial SA heatmaps, and the final prediction of the SA heatmap. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods in group detection and shared attention estimation. Additional analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed components. Code: https://github.com/chihina/sagd-CVPRW2026.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Investigating Identity Signals in Conversational Facial Dynamics via Disentangled Expression Features

This work investigates whether individuals can be identified solely through the pure dynamical components of their facial expressions, independent of static facial appearance. We leverage the FLAME 3D morphable model to achieve explicit disentanglement between facial shape and expression dynamics, extracting frame-by-frame parameters from conversational videos while retaining only expression and jaw coefficients. On the CANDOR dataset of 1,429 speakers in naturalistic conversations, our Conformer model with supervised contrastive learning achieves 61.14\%accuracy on 1,429-way classification -- 458 times above chance -- demonstrating that facial dynamics carry strong identity signatures. We introduce a drift-to-noise ratio (DNR) that quantifies the reliability of shape expression separation by measuring across-session shape changes relative to within-session variability. DNR strongly negatively correlates with recognition performance, confirming that unstable shape estimation compromises dynamic identification. Our findings reveal person-specific signatures in conversational facial dynamics, with implications for social perception and clinical assessment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing 3D Gaze Estimation in the Wild using Weak Supervision with Gaze Following Labels

Accurate 3D gaze estimation in unconstrained real-world environments remains a significant challenge due to variations in appearance, head pose, occlusion, and the limited availability of in-the-wild 3D gaze datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Self-Training Weakly-Supervised Gaze Estimation framework (ST-WSGE). This two-stage learning framework leverages diverse 2D gaze datasets, such as gaze-following data, which offer rich variations in appearances, natural scenes, and gaze distributions, and proposes an approach to generate 3D pseudo-labels and enhance model generalization. Furthermore, traditional modality-specific models, designed separately for images or videos, limit the effective use of available training data. To overcome this, we propose the Gaze Transformer (GaT), a modality-agnostic architecture capable of simultaneously learning static and dynamic gaze information from both image and video datasets. By combining 3D video datasets with 2D gaze target labels from gaze following tasks, our approach achieves the following key contributions: (i) Significant state-of-the-art improvements in within-domain and cross-domain generalization on unconstrained benchmarks like Gaze360 and GFIE, with notable cross-modal gains in video gaze estimation; (ii) Superior cross-domain performance on datasets such as MPIIFaceGaze and Gaze360 compared to frontal face methods. Code and pre-trained models will be released to the community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Giving Sense to Inputs: Toward an Accessible Control Framework for Shared Autonomy

While shared autonomy offers significant potential for assistive robotics, key questions remain about how to effectively map 2D control inputs to 6D robot motions. An intuitive framework should allow users to input commands effortlessly, with the robot responding as expected, without users needing to anticipate the impact of their inputs. In this article, we propose a dynamic input mapping framework that links joystick movements to motions on control frames defined along a trajectory encoded with canal surfaces. We evaluate our method in a user study with 20 participants, demonstrating that our input mapping framework reduces the workload and improves usability compared to a baseline mapping with similar motion encoding. To prepare for deployment in assistive scenarios, we built on the development from the accessible gaming community to select an accessible control interface. We then tested the system in an exploratory study, where three wheelchair users controlled the robot for both daily living activities and a creative painting task, demonstrating its feasibility for users closer to our target population.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Loose Social-Interaction Recognition in Real-world Therapy Scenarios

The computer vision community has explored dyadic interactions for atomic actions such as pushing, carrying-object, etc. However, with the advancement in deep learning models, there is a need to explore more complex dyadic situations such as loose interactions. These are interactions where two people perform certain atomic activities to complete a global action irrespective of temporal synchronisation and physical engagement, like cooking-together for example. Analysing these types of dyadic-interactions has several useful applications in the medical domain for social-skills development and mental health diagnosis. To achieve this, we propose a novel dual-path architecture to capture the loose interaction between two individuals. Our model learns global abstract features from each stream via a CNNs backbone and fuses them using a new Global-Layer-Attention module based on a cross-attention strategy. We evaluate our model on real-world autism diagnoses such as our Loose-Interaction dataset, and the publicly available Autism dataset for loose interactions. Our network achieves baseline results on the Loose-Interaction and SOTA results on the Autism datasets. Moreover, we study different social interactions by experimenting on a publicly available dataset i.e. NTU-RGB+D (interactive classes from both NTU-60 and NTU-120). We have found that different interactions require different network designs. We also compare a slightly different version of our method by incorporating time information to address tight interactions achieving SOTA results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Weakly-supervised Autism Severity Assessment in Long Videos

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a diverse collection of neurobiological conditions marked by challenges in social communication and reciprocal interactions, as well as repetitive and stereotypical behaviors. Atypical behavior patterns in a long, untrimmed video can serve as biomarkers for children with ASD. In this paper, we propose a video-based weakly-supervised method that takes spatio-temporal features of long videos to learn typical and atypical behaviors for autism detection. On top of that, we propose a shallow TCN-MLP network, which is designed to further categorize the severity score. We evaluate our method on actual evaluation videos of children with autism collected and annotated (for severity score) by clinical professionals. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of behavioral biomarkers that could help clinicians in autism spectrum analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Exploring the Zero-Shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Improving Gaze Following

Contextual cues related to a person's pose and interactions with objects and other people in the scene can provide valuable information for gaze following. While existing methods have focused on dedicated cue extraction methods, in this work we investigate the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for extracting a wide array of contextual cues to improve gaze following performance. We first evaluate various VLMs, prompting strategies, and in-context learning (ICL) techniques for zero-shot cue recognition performance. We then use these insights to extract contextual cues for gaze following, and investigate their impact when incorporated into a state of the art model for the task. Our analysis indicates that BLIP-2 is the overall top performing VLM and that ICL can improve performance. We also observe that VLMs are sensitive to the choice of the text prompt although ensembling over multiple text prompts can provide more robust performance. Additionally, we discover that using the entire image along with an ellipse drawn around the target person is the most effective strategy for visual prompting. For gaze following, incorporating the extracted cues results in better generalization performance, especially when considering a larger set of cues, highlighting the potential of this approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

GeoSACS: Geometric Shared Autonomy via Canal Surfaces

We introduce GeoSACS, a geometric framework for shared autonomy (SA). In variable environments, SA methods can be used to combine robotic capabilities with real-time human input in a way that offloads the physical task from the human. To remain intuitive, it can be helpful to simplify requirements for human input (i.e., reduce the dimensionality), which create challenges for to map low-dimensional human inputs to the higher dimensional control space of robots without requiring large amounts of data. We built GeoSACS on canal surfaces, a geometric framework that represents potential robot trajectories as a canal from as few as two demonstrations. GeoSACS maps user corrections on the cross-sections of this canal to provide an efficient SA framework. We extend canal surfaces to consider orientation and update the control frames to support intuitive mapping from user input to robot motions. Finally, we demonstrate GeoSACS in two preliminary studies, including a complex manipulation task where a robot loads laundry into a washer.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

A Novel Framework for Multi-Person Temporal Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction

Gaze following and social gaze prediction are fundamental tasks providing insights into human communication behaviors, intent, and social interactions. Most previous approaches addressed these tasks separately, either by designing highly specialized social gaze models that do not generalize to other social gaze tasks or by considering social gaze inference as an ad-hoc post-processing of the gaze following task. Furthermore, the vast majority of gaze following approaches have proposed static models that can handle only one person at a time, therefore failing to take advantage of social interactions and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we address these limitations and introduce a novel framework to jointly predict the gaze target and social gaze label for all people in the scene. The framework comprises of: (i) a temporal, transformer-based architecture that, in addition to image tokens, handles person-specific tokens capturing the gaze information related to each individual; (ii) a new dataset, VSGaze, that unifies annotation types across multiple gaze following and social gaze datasets. We show that our model trained on VSGaze can address all tasks jointly, and achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-person gaze following and social gaze prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Sharingan: A Transformer-based Architecture for Gaze Following

Gaze is a powerful form of non-verbal communication and social interaction that humans develop from an early age. As such, modeling this behavior is an important task that can benefit a broad set of application domains ranging from robotics to sociology. In particular, Gaze Following is defined as the prediction of the pixel-wise 2D location where a person in the image is looking. Prior efforts in this direction have focused primarily on CNN-based architectures to perform the task. In this paper, we introduce a novel transformer-based architecture for 2D gaze prediction. We experiment with 2 variants: the first one retains the same task formulation of predicting a gaze heatmap for one person at a time, while the second one casts the problem as a 2D point regression and allows us to perform multi-person gaze prediction with a single forward pass. This new architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the GazeFollow and VideoAttentionTarget datasets. The code for this paper will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

A Modular Multimodal Architecture for Gaze Target Prediction: Application to Privacy-Sensitive Settings

Predicting where a person is looking is a complex task, requiring to understand not only the person's gaze and scene content, but also the 3D scene structure and the person's situation (are they manipulating? interacting or observing others? attentive?) to detect obstructions in the line of sight or apply attention priors that humans typically have when observing others. In this paper, we hypothesize that identifying and leveraging such priors can be better achieved through the exploitation of explicitly derived multimodal cues such as depth and pose. We thus propose a modular multimodal architecture allowing to combine these cues using an attention mechanism. The architecture can naturally be exploited in privacy-sensitive situations such as surveillance and health, where personally identifiable information cannot be released. We perform extensive experiments on the GazeFollow and VideoAttentionTarget public datasets, obtaining state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating very competitive results in the privacy setting case.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

ChildPlay: A New Benchmark for Understanding Children's Gaze Behaviour

Gaze behaviors such as eye-contact or shared attention are important markers for diagnosing developmental disorders in children. While previous studies have looked at some of these elements, the analysis is usually performed on private datasets and is restricted to lab settings. Furthermore, all publicly available gaze target prediction benchmarks mostly contain instances of adults, which makes models trained on them less applicable to scenarios with young children. In this paper, we propose the first study for predicting the gaze target of children and interacting adults. To this end, we introduce the ChildPlay dataset: a curated collection of short video clips featuring children playing and interacting with adults in uncontrolled environments (e.g. kindergarten, therapy centers, preschools etc.), which we annotate with rich gaze information. We further propose a new model for gaze target prediction that is geometrically grounded by explicitly identifying the scene parts in the 3D field of view (3DFoV) of the person, leveraging recent geometry preserving depth inference methods. Our model achieves state of the art results on benchmark datasets and ChildPlay. Furthermore, results show that looking at faces prediction performance on children is much worse than on adults, and can be significantly improved by fine-tuning models using child gaze annotations. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

An Efficient Image-to-Image Translation HourGlass-based Architecture for Object Pushing Policy Learning

Humans effortlessly solve pushing tasks in everyday life but unlocking these capabilities remains a challenge in robotics because physics models of these tasks are often inaccurate or unattainable. State-of-the-art data-driven approaches learn to compensate for these inaccuracies or replace the approximated physics models altogether. Nevertheless, approaches like Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) suffer from local optima in large state-action spaces. Furthermore, they rely on well-chosen deep learning architectures and learning paradigms. In this paper, we propose to frame the learning of pushing policies (where to push and how) by DQNs as an image-to-image translation problem and exploit an Hourglass-based architecture. We present an architecture combining a predictor of which pushes lead to changes in the environment with a state-action value predictor dedicated to the pushing task. Moreover, we investigate positional information encoding to learn position-dependent policy behaviors. We demonstrate in simulation experiments with a UR5 robot arm that our overall architecture helps the DQN learn faster and achieve higher performance in a pushing task involving objects with unknown dynamics.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Pose Transformers (POTR): Human Motion Prediction with Non-Autoregressive Transformers

We propose to leverage Transformer architectures for non-autoregressive human motion prediction. Our approach decodes elements in parallel from a query sequence, instead of conditioning on previous predictions such as instate-of-the-art RNN-based approaches. In such a way our approach is less computational intensive and potentially avoids error accumulation to long term elements in the sequence. In that context, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we frame human motion prediction as a sequence-to-sequence problem and propose a non-autoregressive Transformer to infer the sequences of poses in parallel; (ii) we propose to decode sequences of 3D poses from a query sequence generated in advance with elements from the input sequence;(iii) we propose to perform skeleton-based activity classification from the encoder memory, in the hope that identifying the activity can improve predictions;(iv) we show that despite its simplicity, our approach achieves competitive results in two public datasets, although surprisingly more for short term predictions rather than for long term ones.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

IEEE SLT 2021 Alpha-mini Speech Challenge: Open Datasets, Tracks, Rules and Baselines

The IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) 2021 Alpha-mini Speech Challenge (ASC) is intended to improve research on keyword spotting (KWS) and sound source location (SSL) on humanoid robots. Many publications report significant improvements in deep learning based KWS and SSL on open source datasets in recent years. For deep learning model training, it is necessary to expand the data coverage to improve the robustness of model. Thus, simulating multi-channel noisy and reverberant data from single-channel speech, noise, echo and room impulsive response (RIR) is widely adopted. However, this approach may generate mismatch between simulated data and recorded data in real application scenarios, especially echo data. In this challenge, we open source a sizable speech, keyword, echo and noise corpus for promoting data-driven methods, particularly deep-learning approaches on KWS and SSL. We also choose Alpha-mini, a humanoid robot produced by UBTECH equipped with a built-in four-microphone array on its head, to record development and evaluation sets under the actual Alpha-mini robot application scenario, including noise as well as echo and mechanical noise generated by the robot itself for model evaluation. Furthermore, we illustrate the rules, evaluation methods and baselines for researchers to quickly assess their achievements and optimize their models.

cs.SD↗