Enhancing Accuracy of Uncertainty Estimation in Appearance-based Gaze Tracking with Probabilistic Evaluation and Calibration

Qiaojie Zheng, Jiucai Zhang, Amy Zhang, Xiaoli Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 13793-13801

Accurate uncertainty estimation is essential for reliable appearance-based gaze tracking. However, domain shifts between training and testing often lead to incorrect uncertainty estimates, which is a problem overlooked in existing uncertainty-aware gaze tracking models. To overcome this problem efficiently, we formulate uncertainty estimation as a conditional distribution problem and treat the correction process as an output-level conditional distribution matching task. We therefore introduce a data-efficient post-hoc calibration method to align the predicted, high-error conditional distribution with the empirically observed distribution extracted from a small set of calibration samples. To more faithfully assess the accuracy of the resulting uncertainty estimates, we further introduce a new metric, Coverage Probability Error (CPE), to quantify the distribution-level mismatch between prediction and observation. We validate the calibration procedure across four domain shift scenarios to demonstrate improved uncertainty accuracy and its practical benefits.