fMRI-LM: Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Language-Aligned fMRI Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wei, Yuxiang, Zhang, Yanteng, Xiao, Xi, Qian, Chengxuan, Wang, Tianyang, Calhoun, Vince D.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wei, Yuxiang
Zhang, Yanteng
Xiao, Xi
Qian, Chengxuan
Wang, Tianyang
Calhoun, Vince D.
author_facet Wei, Yuxiang
Zhang, Yanteng
Xiao, Xi
Qian, Chengxuan
Wang, Tianyang
Calhoun, Vince D.
contents Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have enabled unified reasoning across images, audio, and video, but extending such capability to brain imaging remains largely unexplored. Bridging this gap is essential to link neural activity with semantic cognition and to develop cross-modal brain representations. To this end, we present fMRI-LM, a foundational model that bridges functional MRI (fMRI) and language through a three-stage framework. In Stage 1, we learn a neural tokenizer that maps fMRI into discrete tokens embedded in a language-consistent space. In Stage 2, a pretrained LLM is adapted to jointly model fMRI tokens and text, treating brain activity as a sequence that can be temporally predicted and linguistically described. To overcome the lack of natural fMRI-text pairs, we construct a large descriptive corpus that translates diverse imaging-based features into structured textual descriptors, capturing the low-level organization of fMRI signals. In Stage 3, we perform multi-task, multi-paradigm instruction tuning to endow fMRI-LM with high-level semantic understanding, supporting diverse downstream applications. Across various benchmarks, fMRI-LM achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot performance, and adapts efficiently with parameter-efficient tuning (LoRA), establishing a scalable pathway toward a language-aligned, universal model for structural and semantic understanding of fMRI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle fMRI-LM: Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Language-Aligned fMRI Understanding
Wei, Yuxiang
Zhang, Yanteng
Xiao, Xi
Qian, Chengxuan
Wang, Tianyang
Calhoun, Vince D.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have enabled unified reasoning across images, audio, and video, but extending such capability to brain imaging remains largely unexplored. Bridging this gap is essential to link neural activity with semantic cognition and to develop cross-modal brain representations. To this end, we present fMRI-LM, a foundational model that bridges functional MRI (fMRI) and language through a three-stage framework. In Stage 1, we learn a neural tokenizer that maps fMRI into discrete tokens embedded in a language-consistent space. In Stage 2, a pretrained LLM is adapted to jointly model fMRI tokens and text, treating brain activity as a sequence that can be temporally predicted and linguistically described. To overcome the lack of natural fMRI-text pairs, we construct a large descriptive corpus that translates diverse imaging-based features into structured textual descriptors, capturing the low-level organization of fMRI signals. In Stage 3, we perform multi-task, multi-paradigm instruction tuning to endow fMRI-LM with high-level semantic understanding, supporting diverse downstream applications. Across various benchmarks, fMRI-LM achieves strong zero-shot and few-shot performance, and adapts efficiently with parameter-efficient tuning (LoRA), establishing a scalable pathway toward a language-aligned, universal model for structural and semantic understanding of fMRI.
title fMRI-LM: Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Language-Aligned fMRI Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21760