Machine learning systems and methods that learn glare, and thus determine gaze direction in a manner more resilient to the effects of glare on input images. The machine learning systems have an isolated representation of glare, e.g., information on the locations of glare points in an image, as an explicit input, in addition to the image itself. In this manner, the machine learning systems explicitly consider glare while making a determination of gaze direction, thus producing more accurate results for images containing glare.