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Chartist: Task-Driven Eye Movement Control for Chart Reading (arxiv.org)
14 points by PaulHoule on Feb 23, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: A model predicts eye movements on charts for tasks like finding the highest bar: a language model picks a goal, and a trained controller moves the eyes. Unlike models that ignored the task, its eye paths matched people's, though accuracy and generalizability remain limited.

Abstract · Chartist: Task-driven Eye Movement Control for Chart Reading

To design data visualizations that are easy to comprehend, we need to understand how people with different interests read them. Computational models of predicting scanpaths on charts could complement empirical studies by offering estimates of user performance inexpensively; however, previous models have been limited to gaze patterns and overlooked the effects of tasks. Here, we contribute Chartist, a computational model that simulates how users move their eyes to extract information from the chart in order to perform analysis tasks, including value retrieval, filtering, and finding extremes. The novel contribution lies in a two-level hierarchical control architecture. At the high level, the model uses LLMs to comprehend the information gained so far and applies this representation to select a goal for the lower-level controllers, which, in turn, move the eyes in accordance with a sampling policy learned via reinforcement learning. The model is capable of predicting human-like task-driven scanpaths across various tasks. It can be applied in fields such as explainable AI, visualization design evaluation, and optimization. While it displays limitations in terms of generalizability and accuracy, it takes modeling in a promising direction, toward understanding human behaviors in interacting with charts.

Danqing Shi, Yao Wang, Yunpeng Bai, Andreas Bulling, Antti Oulasvirta
arXiv:2502.03575 · cs.HC · submitted Feb 5, 2025
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Looks like it could be very useful for frontend design in general; having the right information where the eye would naturally go would be huge for UX I think
I can imagine research like this being interesting in the automotive UI design domain. Would be interesting to measure driver distraction and design UIs based on cognitive load.