TDSal: Task-Based Top-Down Saliency Prediction Model

Abstract

Visual saliency aims to predict the regions of an image most likely to attract human visual attention. While most saliency models assume free-viewing conditions, human attention is often shaped by explicit task goals. In this work, we address task-driven saliency prediction by proposing a model that conditions visual attention on natural-language task descriptions. The model produces task-dependent saliency maps that reflect how attention shifts under different viewing intents. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show that incorporating explicit task semantics enables more faithful modeling of goal-directed visual attention.