NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment

Visual decoding from brain signals is a key challenge at the intersection of computer vision and neuroscience, requiring methods that bridge neural representations and computational models of vision. We introduce a tri-modal contrastive framework for EEG-based visual decoding that aligns EEG, visual, and textual representations within a unified latent space. Our approach follows a two-stage design. First, we pre-train an EEG encoder via masked reconstruction on unlabeled trials, learning spatio-temporal regularities that transfer robustly to downstream tasks. Second, we jointly align EEG, image, and LLM-generated textual descriptions through contrastive learning, where text supervision acts as a semantic regularizer that injects linguistic structure into the shared space without overwhelming the primary EEG-image signal. The encoder integrates subject-specific adaptation, graph-attention over channels, and temporal-spatial convolutional embeddings. On the Things-EEG2 200-way zero-shot benchmark, our framework achieves 54.1% Top-1 and 83.4% Top-5 accuracy, substantially exceeding the strongest prior baseline (32.4% / 64.0%), with paired Wilcoxon tests confirming significance (p < 0.01) over all in-subject baselines. We validate generalization on Things-MEG. Analysis reveals that compact embedding geometries (CN-CLIP) outperform much larger backbones, and that decoding aligns with established neurophysiology of visual processing. This work is a critical step towards robust, semantically-grounded visual decoding from non-invasive temporal neural signals. The source code is publicly available in https://github.com/anon-eeg/eeg_image_decoding.

Electroencephalography (EEG) visual decoding remains challenging due to the modality gap between low-SNR neural signals and highly structured vision--language spaces, making direct cross-modal alignment unstable. To address this, we propose STAMBRIDGE, a versatile two-stage framework that sequentially tackles feature conditioning and cross-modal alignment. First, we introduce a Spectral-Temporal Amplitude-aware Modulation (STAM) to extract well-conditioned EEG representations. By replacing hard frequency masking with amplitude-derived soft channel weighting and multi-scale temporal convolutions, STAM explicitly preserves frequency-aware transients while reducing the risk of time-domain ringing artifacts. Building upon these robust neural features, we further introduce a model-agnostic Mid-Feature Semantic Bridge (MFSB) that constructs a regularized intermediate space through directed cross-modal interactions, enabling staged distillation and more stable semantic alignment. Experiments on the THINGS-EEG benchmark show competitive 200-way zero-shot retrieval performance, with 34.50% Top-1 and 65.95% Top-5 accuracy. In addition, embeddings learned by STAMBRIDGE produce semantically coherent image reconstructions with a diffusion model, demonstrating robust EEG-to-vision semantic alignment. The code is available at: https://github.com/thabeatmjh/STAMBRIDGE.

EEG-based visual decoding aims to establish a mapping between neural signals and visual semantics. However, it remains constrained by the dual challenges of severe information granularity mismatch and the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of EEG signals. Existing approaches typically treat visual features as static, ignoring the dynamic selectivity of human vision and the frequency specificity of neural oscillations. To bridge this gap, we propose CAIA, a Cognitive-guided Adaptive blurring with Information-Constrained Alignment framework for Neural-Visual decoding. On the visual side, it simulates selective attention to adaptively reduce redundancy. Meanwhile, on the EEG side, it combines neural oscillation priors with an information-bottleneck-inspired spectral sparsity regularizer to enhance SNR. Specifically, we devise a cognitive-dynamics-based adaptive blurring mechanism that dynamically integrates center-biased and saliency-guided visual cues via cross-modal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a distribution-aware boundary calibration loss to robustly rectify alignment bias caused by outlier samples. Moreover, a cognitively guided information-screening method is proposed to select task-relevant EEG oscillations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAIA improves both subject-dependent and subject-independent average Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy in zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval, significantly outperforming prior methods. Our work validates that optimizing visual information density to match neural granularity offers a more interpretable and robust pathway for neural decoding.