Multimodal Recurrent Ensembles for Predicting Brain Responses to Naturalistic Movies (Algonauts 2025)

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Main Authors: Eren, Semih, Kucukahmetler, Deniz, Scherf, Nico
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Eren, Semih
Kucukahmetler, Deniz
Scherf, Nico
author_facet Eren, Semih
Kucukahmetler, Deniz
Scherf, Nico
contents Accurately predicting distributed cortical responses to naturalistic stimuli requires models that integrate visual, auditory and semantic information over time. We present a hierarchical multimodal recurrent ensemble that maps pretrained video, audio, and language embeddings to fMRI time series recorded while four subjects watched almost 80 hours of movies provided by the Algonauts 2025 challenge. Modality-specific bidirectional RNNs encode temporal dynamics; their hidden states are fused and passed to a second recurrent layer, and lightweight subject-specific heads output responses for 1000 cortical parcels. Training relies on a composite MSE-correlation loss and a curriculum that gradually shifts emphasis from early sensory to late association regions. Averaging 100 model variants further boosts robustness. The resulting system ranked third on the competition leaderboard, achieving an overall Pearson r = 0.2094 and the highest single-parcel peak score (mean r = 0.63) among all participants, with particularly strong gains for the most challenging subject (Subject 5). The approach establishes a simple, extensible baseline for future multimodal brain-encoding benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17897
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Recurrent Ensembles for Predicting Brain Responses to Naturalistic Movies (Algonauts 2025)
Eren, Semih
Kucukahmetler, Deniz
Scherf, Nico
Neurons and Cognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Accurately predicting distributed cortical responses to naturalistic stimuli requires models that integrate visual, auditory and semantic information over time. We present a hierarchical multimodal recurrent ensemble that maps pretrained video, audio, and language embeddings to fMRI time series recorded while four subjects watched almost 80 hours of movies provided by the Algonauts 2025 challenge. Modality-specific bidirectional RNNs encode temporal dynamics; their hidden states are fused and passed to a second recurrent layer, and lightweight subject-specific heads output responses for 1000 cortical parcels. Training relies on a composite MSE-correlation loss and a curriculum that gradually shifts emphasis from early sensory to late association regions. Averaging 100 model variants further boosts robustness. The resulting system ranked third on the competition leaderboard, achieving an overall Pearson r = 0.2094 and the highest single-parcel peak score (mean r = 0.63) among all participants, with particularly strong gains for the most challenging subject (Subject 5). The approach establishes a simple, extensible baseline for future multimodal brain-encoding benchmarks.
title Multimodal Recurrent Ensembles for Predicting Brain Responses to Naturalistic Movies (Algonauts 2025)
topic Neurons and Cognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17897