Seeing Through the Brain: New Insights from Decoding Visual Stimuli with fMRI

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Zheng, Zhang, Enpei, Qiu, Weikang, Cai, Yinghao, Yang, Carl, Chen, Elynn, Zhang, Xiang, Ying, Rex, Zhou, Dawei, Yan, Yujun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Zheng
Zhang, Enpei
Qiu, Weikang
Cai, Yinghao
Yang, Carl
Chen, Elynn
Zhang, Xiang
Ying, Rex
Zhou, Dawei
Yan, Yujun
author_facet Huang, Zheng
Zhang, Enpei
Qiu, Weikang
Cai, Yinghao
Yang, Carl
Chen, Elynn
Zhang, Xiang
Ying, Rex
Zhou, Dawei
Yan, Yujun
contents Understanding how the brain encodes visual information is a central challenge in neuroscience and machine learning. A promising approach is to reconstruct visual stimuli, essentially images, from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) signals. This involves two stages: transforming fMRI signals into a latent space and then using a pretrained generative model to reconstruct images. The reconstruction quality depends on how similar the latent space is to the structure of neural activity and how well the generative model produces images from that space. Yet, it remains unclear which type of latent space best supports this transformation and how it should be organized to represent visual stimuli effectively. We present two key findings. First, fMRI signals are more similar to the text space of a language model than to either a vision based space or a joint text image space. Second, text representations and the generative model should be adapted to capture the compositional nature of visual stimuli, including objects, their detailed attributes, and relationships. Building on these insights, we propose PRISM, a model that Projects fMRI sIgnals into a Structured text space as an interMediate representation for visual stimuli reconstruction. It includes an object centric diffusion module that generates images by composing individual objects to reduce object detection errors, and an attribute relationship search module that automatically identifies key attributes and relationships that best align with the neural activity. Extensive experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods, achieving up to an 8% reduction in perceptual loss. These results highlight the importance of using structured text as the intermediate space to bridge fMRI signals and image reconstruction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16196
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Seeing Through the Brain: New Insights from Decoding Visual Stimuli with fMRI
Huang, Zheng
Zhang, Enpei
Qiu, Weikang
Cai, Yinghao
Yang, Carl
Chen, Elynn
Zhang, Xiang
Ying, Rex
Zhou, Dawei
Yan, Yujun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Understanding how the brain encodes visual information is a central challenge in neuroscience and machine learning. A promising approach is to reconstruct visual stimuli, essentially images, from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) signals. This involves two stages: transforming fMRI signals into a latent space and then using a pretrained generative model to reconstruct images. The reconstruction quality depends on how similar the latent space is to the structure of neural activity and how well the generative model produces images from that space. Yet, it remains unclear which type of latent space best supports this transformation and how it should be organized to represent visual stimuli effectively. We present two key findings. First, fMRI signals are more similar to the text space of a language model than to either a vision based space or a joint text image space. Second, text representations and the generative model should be adapted to capture the compositional nature of visual stimuli, including objects, their detailed attributes, and relationships. Building on these insights, we propose PRISM, a model that Projects fMRI sIgnals into a Structured text space as an interMediate representation for visual stimuli reconstruction. It includes an object centric diffusion module that generates images by composing individual objects to reduce object detection errors, and an attribute relationship search module that automatically identifies key attributes and relationships that best align with the neural activity. Extensive experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods, achieving up to an 8% reduction in perceptual loss. These results highlight the importance of using structured text as the intermediate space to bridge fMRI signals and image reconstruction.
title Seeing Through the Brain: New Insights from Decoding Visual Stimuli with fMRI
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16196