Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Liu, Xiaozhao, Shen, Dinggang, Liu, Xihui
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913854704844800
author Liu, Xiaozhao
Shen, Dinggang
Liu, Xihui
author_facet Liu, Xiaozhao
Shen, Dinggang
Liu, Xihui
contents Pretrained generative models have opened new frontiers in brain decoding by enabling the synthesis of realistic texts and images from non-invasive brain recordings. However, the reliability of such outputs remains questionable--whether they truly reflect semantic activation in the brain, or are merely hallucinated by the powerful generative models. In this paper, we focus on EEG-to-text decoding and address its hallucination issue through the lens of posterior collapse. Acknowledging the underlying mismatch in information capacity between EEG and text, we reframe the decoding task as semantic summarization of core meanings rather than previously verbatim reconstruction of stimulus texts. To this end, we propose the Generative Language Inspection Model (GLIM), which emphasizes learning informative and interpretable EEG representations to improve semantic grounding under heterogeneous and small-scale data conditions. Experiments on the public ZuCo dataset demonstrate that GLIM consistently generates fluent, EEG-grounded sentences without teacher forcing. Moreover, it supports more robust evaluation beyond text similarity, through EEG-text retrieval and zero-shot semantic classification across sentiment categories, relation types, and corpus topics. Together, our architecture and evaluation protocols lay the foundation for reliable and scalable benchmarking in generative brain decoding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17099
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation
Liu, Xiaozhao
Shen, Dinggang
Liu, Xihui
Computation and Language
Pretrained generative models have opened new frontiers in brain decoding by enabling the synthesis of realistic texts and images from non-invasive brain recordings. However, the reliability of such outputs remains questionable--whether they truly reflect semantic activation in the brain, or are merely hallucinated by the powerful generative models. In this paper, we focus on EEG-to-text decoding and address its hallucination issue through the lens of posterior collapse. Acknowledging the underlying mismatch in information capacity between EEG and text, we reframe the decoding task as semantic summarization of core meanings rather than previously verbatim reconstruction of stimulus texts. To this end, we propose the Generative Language Inspection Model (GLIM), which emphasizes learning informative and interpretable EEG representations to improve semantic grounding under heterogeneous and small-scale data conditions. Experiments on the public ZuCo dataset demonstrate that GLIM consistently generates fluent, EEG-grounded sentences without teacher forcing. Moreover, it supports more robust evaluation beyond text similarity, through EEG-text retrieval and zero-shot semantic classification across sentiment categories, relation types, and corpus topics. Together, our architecture and evaluation protocols lay the foundation for reliable and scalable benchmarking in generative brain decoding.
title Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17099