Why We Look Where We Look: Emergent Human-like Fixations of a Foveated Visual Language Model Maximizing Scene Understanding
When humans view scenes without a specific task (free-viewing), they initially direct their eye movements toward the scene center and then fixate on people, text, objects being gazed at or grasped, and semantically meaningful regions. What these signature fixation patterns reflect and whether they optimize an underlying perceptual task remain unknown. We show that a computational agent with simulated foveation, trained to optimize scene comprehension, exhibits emergent human fixation signature patterns. In contrast, versions of the agent trained to search or classify scenes, or equipped with peripheral vision that was better or worse than human vision, predicted human fixation patterns le...
| Authors | Shravan Murlidaran, Ziqi Wen, Sana Shehabi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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