MIRAGE: Adaptive Multimodal Gating for Whole-Brain fMRI Encoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gokce, Abdulkadir, AlKhamissi, Badr, Schrimpf, Martin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Gokce, Abdulkadir
AlKhamissi, Badr
Schrimpf, Martin
author_facet Gokce, Abdulkadir
AlKhamissi, Badr
Schrimpf, Martin
contents Recent progress in task-optimized neural networks has established encoding models as a powerful tool for predicting brain responses to naturalistic stimuli, yet most existing approaches rely on unimodal representations. The emergence of omni-modal foundation models and rich multimodal neural datasets enables encoding models that jointly integrate visual, auditory, and linguistic information across subjects. We introduce MIRAGE, a brain encoding framework for predicting whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli. MIRAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance via a native multimodal backbone and adaptive feature gating across layers. These representations are then combined with a transformer-based brain encoder and a subject-specific linear head over the cortical parcels. Controlled comparisons show that natively multimodal features consistently outperform post-hoc aggregation of independent unimodal features, across architectural levels and backbones. Beyond predictive accuracy, the learned attention weights are directly inspectable to interpret the modality-specific gating profile over the backbone, and each modality traces a distinct anatomical pattern across cortex. Together, these results propose adaptive layer-wise aggregation of natively multimodal features as a generalizable, interpretable, and accurate approach for whole-brain encoding.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_29850
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publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle MIRAGE: Adaptive Multimodal Gating for Whole-Brain fMRI Encoding
Gokce, Abdulkadir
AlKhamissi, Badr
Schrimpf, Martin
Machine Learning
Recent progress in task-optimized neural networks has established encoding models as a powerful tool for predicting brain responses to naturalistic stimuli, yet most existing approaches rely on unimodal representations. The emergence of omni-modal foundation models and rich multimodal neural datasets enables encoding models that jointly integrate visual, auditory, and linguistic information across subjects. We introduce MIRAGE, a brain encoding framework for predicting whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic audiovisual stimuli. MIRAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance via a native multimodal backbone and adaptive feature gating across layers. These representations are then combined with a transformer-based brain encoder and a subject-specific linear head over the cortical parcels. Controlled comparisons show that natively multimodal features consistently outperform post-hoc aggregation of independent unimodal features, across architectural levels and backbones. Beyond predictive accuracy, the learned attention weights are directly inspectable to interpret the modality-specific gating profile over the backbone, and each modality traces a distinct anatomical pattern across cortex. Together, these results propose adaptive layer-wise aggregation of natively multimodal features as a generalizable, interpretable, and accurate approach for whole-brain encoding.
title MIRAGE: Adaptive Multimodal Gating for Whole-Brain fMRI Encoding
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29850