EyeMulator: Improving Code Language Models by Mimicking Human Visual Attention
Yifan Zhang SalesForce.com, Chen Huang National University of Singapore, Yueke Zhang, Jiahao Zhang Vanderbilt University, Toby Jia-Jun Li University of Notre Dame, Collin McMillan University of Notre Dame, Kevin Leach Vanderbilt University, Yu Huang Vanderbilt University
Code Language Models (CodeLLMs) traditionally learn attention based solely on statistical input-output token correlations (“machine attention”). In contrast, human developers rely on intuition, selectively fixating on semantically salient tokens during program comprehension. We present EyeMulator, a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes. By extracting scan paths from eye-tracking data, we derive token-level attention weights used to augment the loss function during fine-tuning. This induces the model to mimic human focus. Our evaluation across StarCoder, Llama-3.2, and DeepSeek-Coder shows that EyeMulator significantly outperforms baselines, achieving gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization. Ablation studies confirm that these gains stem directly from replicating human attention dynamics. Artifacts are available at https://zenodo.org/records/17205682.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表