Duala: Dual-Level Alignment of Subjects and Stimuli for Cross-Subject fMRI Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Shumeng, Guo, Jintao, Zhang, Jian, Zhou, Yulin, Cao, Luyang, Shi, Yinghuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Li, Shumeng
Guo, Jintao
Zhang, Jian
Zhou, Yulin
Cao, Luyang
Shi, Yinghuan
author_facet Li, Shumeng
Guo, Jintao
Zhang, Jian
Zhou, Yulin
Cao, Luyang
Shi, Yinghuan
contents Cross-subject visual decoding aims to reconstruct visual experiences from brain activity across individuals, enabling more scalable and practical brain-computer interfaces. However, existing methods often suffer from degraded performance when adapting to new subjects with limited data, as they struggle to preserve both the semantic consistency of stimuli and the alignment of brain responses. To address these challenges, we propose Duala, a dual-level alignment framework designed to achieve stimulus-level consistency and subject-level alignment in fMRI-based cross-subject visual decoding. (1) At the stimulus level, Duala introduces a semantic alignment and relational consistency strategy that preserves intra-class similarity and inter-class separability, maintaining clear semantic boundaries during adaptation. (2) At the subject level, a distribution-based feature perturbation mechanism is developed to capture both global and subject-specific variations, enabling adaptation to individual neural representations without overfitting. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that Duala effectively improves alignment across subjects. Remarkably, even when fine-tuned with only about one hour of fMRI data, Duala achieves over 81.1% image-to-brain retrieval accuracy and consistently outperforms existing fine-tuning strategies in both retrieval and reconstruction. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShumengLI/Duala.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Duala: Dual-Level Alignment of Subjects and Stimuli for Cross-Subject fMRI Decoding
Li, Shumeng
Guo, Jintao
Zhang, Jian
Zhou, Yulin
Cao, Luyang
Shi, Yinghuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cross-subject visual decoding aims to reconstruct visual experiences from brain activity across individuals, enabling more scalable and practical brain-computer interfaces. However, existing methods often suffer from degraded performance when adapting to new subjects with limited data, as they struggle to preserve both the semantic consistency of stimuli and the alignment of brain responses. To address these challenges, we propose Duala, a dual-level alignment framework designed to achieve stimulus-level consistency and subject-level alignment in fMRI-based cross-subject visual decoding. (1) At the stimulus level, Duala introduces a semantic alignment and relational consistency strategy that preserves intra-class similarity and inter-class separability, maintaining clear semantic boundaries during adaptation. (2) At the subject level, a distribution-based feature perturbation mechanism is developed to capture both global and subject-specific variations, enabling adaptation to individual neural representations without overfitting. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that Duala effectively improves alignment across subjects. Remarkably, even when fine-tuned with only about one hour of fMRI data, Duala achieves over 81.1% image-to-brain retrieval accuracy and consistently outperforms existing fine-tuning strategies in both retrieval and reconstruction. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShumengLI/Duala.
title Duala: Dual-Level Alignment of Subjects and Stimuli for Cross-Subject fMRI Decoding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07625