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

Abstract

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.