MindEye2: Shared-Subject Models Enable fMRI-To-Image With 1 Hour of Data

Reconstructing visual images from fMRI data is a central but challenging problem in neuroscience. Despite recent progress, current methods fall short when data and computation are limited-precisely the conditions under which this task is most critical. We introduce Adapter Alignment, a staged, architecture-agnostic training procedure for adapting a pre-trained reconstruction model to a new subject with little data. Rather than letting a shared representation space emerge implicitly, lightweight subject-specific adapters are first explicitly aligned to a pre-trained reference subject on a small set of shared calibration images, and the full pipeline is then fine-tuned while preserving this alignment. The resulting representations not only place different subjects in a shared space but also align them semantically. Our results demonstrate significant gains in low-data regimes, improving reconstruction metrics by up to 8%, and pre-diffusion retrieval shows that these gains reflect additional image-specific information in the fMRI embeddings rather than the generative prior. We also propose a coverage-based algorithm to select representative calibration images. Using both techniques together, we surpass baseline models fine-tuned with one hour of data using only 24 minutes of subject-specific data. The procedure is effective across architectures, reference subjects, and datasets, including adapting 3T subjects to a 7T reference.

Existing cross-subject fMRI decoding methods typically train a model on multiple scanned subjects and then adapt it to a new subject using substantial paired fMRI-image data. However, in realistic scenarios, new-subject fMRI data are often limited due to costly data acquisition, and raw data from previous subjects may be inaccessible, leading existing methods to suffer performance degradation during new-subject adaptation. In this paper, we identify that this degradation stems from two key issues: brain-side instability caused by large subject differences in fMRI responses, and image-side supervision unreliability caused by fine-grained visual details that are not reliably supported by limited fMRI signals. To address these challenges, we propose StableMind, a regularized adaptation framework designed to improve brain-side representation stability and image-side supervision reliability. (1) To stabilize brain representations, StableMind reuses ridge projections from the pretrained model as adaptation priors to constrain limited-data new-subject adaptation, and applies Fourier-based feature-level brain augmentation to improve robustness to individual variability. (2) To improve image supervision reliability, StableMind introduces difficulty-aware image blur for brain-image alignment, reducing the influence of fine-grained visual details that are weakly supported by limited fMRI signals while preserving stable visual structure. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset under a unified 1-hour adaptation protocol demonstrate that StableMind achieves 84.02% image retrieval accuracy and 81.66% brain retrieval accuracy averaged over four subjects, surpassing the state-of-the-art method by 5.71% brain retrieval accuracy with fewer trainable adaptation parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/StableMind.

Recent progress in visual brain decoding from fMRI has been enabled by large-scale datasets such as the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) and powerful diffusion-based generative models. While current pipelines are primarily optimized for perception, their performance under mental-imagery remains less well understood. In this work, we study how a state-of-the-art (SOTA) perception decoder (DynaDiff) can be adapted to reconstruct imagined content from the NSD-Imagery benchmark. We propose a latent functional alignment (LFA) approach that maps imagery-evoked activity to the pretrained model's semantic content-enriched conditioning space, by adding a simple alignment module, while keeping the original remaining components frozen. To mitigate the limited amount of matched imagery-perception supervision, we further introduce a neural retrieval-based augmentation strategy that selects semantically related NSD perception trials from the same participants. Across four subjects, LFA consistently improves high-level semantic reconstruction metrics relative to the frozen pretrained baseline and a voxel-space ridge alignment baseline, and enables above-chance decoding from multiple cortical regions. These results suggest that semantic structure learned from perception can be leveraged to stabilize and improve visual imagery decoding under out-of-distribution conditions.