Organizations: Visual Information Processing Laboratory, School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Visual stimuli reconstruction from EEG remains challenging due to fidelity loss and representation shift. We propose CognitionCapturerPro, an enhanced framework that integrates EEG with multi-modal priors (images, text, depth, and edges) via collaborative training. Our core contributions include an uncertainty-weighted similarity scoring mechanism to quantify modality-specific fidelity and a fusion encoder for integrating shared representations. By employing a simplified alignment module and a pre-trained diffusion model, our method significantly outperforms the original CognitionCapturer on the THINGS-EEG dataset, improving Top-1 and Top-5 retrieval accuracy by 25.9% and 10.6%, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/XiaoZhangYES/CognitionCapturerPro.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Core challenges in EEG-based visual decoding. We categorize the misalignment between brain signals and visual stimuli into two aspects: (Left) Representational Shift , where the brain’s associative mechanisms introduce non-visual semantics that deviate from the pixel-level content; and (Right) Fidelity Loss , where selective attention and perceptual uncertainty result in incomplete or localized neural capture of the original image.
Fig. 2: Overview of CognitionCapturerPro: Figure (a) depicts the encoder training process, where multimodal data such as EEG and images are processed by independent encoders, integrated through a fusion encoder, and constrained by an improved contrastive loss. (b) depicts the SCM-Loss, which filters positive pairs using semantic labels and similarity to address one-to-many mappings. (c) depicts the STH-Align structure, which maps embeddings from various modalities into a unified image space via a shared backbone and multimodal projection heads. (d) depicts how the aligned multimodal embeddings are conditionally injected through the SDXL-Turbo model with a multi-branch IP-Adapter to reconstruct semantically consistent and high-fidelity images.
Method
Subject 1
Subject 2
Subject 3
Subject 4
Subject 5
Subject 6
Subject 7
Subject 8
Subject 9
Subject 10
Avg
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
BraVL [ 4 ]
6.1
17.9
4.9
14.9
5.6
17.4
5.0
15.1
4.0
13.4
6.0
18.2
6.5
20.4
8.8
23.7
4.3
14.0
7.0
19.7
5.8
17.5
NICE [ 16 ]
13.2
39.5
12.5
40.3
14.5
42.7
15.3
39.6
10.1
31.5
16.5
44.0
17.0
42.1
12.9
56.1
15.4
41.6
17.4
45.8
14.1
43.6
NICE-S [ 16 ]
13.3
40.2
13.1
36.1
15.3
42.6
20.9
52.0
9.8
34.4
14.2
42.4
17.9
43.6
28.2
50.2
14.4
38.7
16.0
42.8
16.7
41.7
NICE-G [ 16 ]
15.2
40.1
13.9
40.1
15.7
42.7
17.6
48.9
9.0
29.7
16.3
44.4
14.9
43.1
20.3
52.1
14.1
39.7
19.6
46.7
15.6
42.8
MB2C [ 21 ]
23.6
56.3
22.6
50.5
26.3
60.1
34.8
67.0
21.3
53.0
31.0
62.3
35.0
64.8
39.0
69.3
27.5
59.3
33.1
70.8
28.4
60.3
TABLE I: Zero-shot retrieval performance on the Things-EEG dataset. The table reports the Top-1 and Top-5 accuracies (%) for ten subjects and their average. CogCapPro (I), (T), (D), (E), and (F) denote the results using Image, Text, Depth, Edge, and multi-modal Fusion, respectively. Bold values indicate the best performance.
Method
Subject 1
Subject 2
Subject 3
Subject 4
Avg
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
top-1
top-5
NICE [ 16 ]
9.6
27.8
18.5
47.8
14.2
41.6
9.0
26.6
12.8
36.0
NICE-S [ 16 ]
9.8
27.8
18.6
46.4
10.5
38.4
11.7
27.2
12.7
35.0
NICE-G [ 16 ]
8.7
30.5
21.8
56.6
16.5
49.7
10.3
32.3
14.3
42.3
UBP [ 20 ]
15.0
38.0
46.0
80.5
27.3
59.0
18.5
43.5
26.7
55.2
ATS [ 19 ]
15.5
42.0
61.5
88.0
33.0
69.5
19.0
43.5
32.3
62.4
TABLE II: Zero-shot retrieval performance on the Things-MEG dataset.
Fig. 3: Qualitative comparison of image reconstruction results on the Things-EEG dataset. The first row displays the ground-truth visual stimuli. Subsequent rows show reconstructions generated by CogCapPro, CogCap, and ATM, respectively.
Method
Low-level
High-level
PixCorr ↑
SSIM ↑
Inception ↑
CLIP ↑
SwAV ↓
MindEye (fMRI) [ 37 ]
0.322
0.431
0.954
0.930
0.344
META (MEG) [ 2 ]
0.090
0.341
0.703
0.811
0.567
ATM (MEG) [ 15 ]
0.104
0.340
0.619
0.603
0.651
CogCap (EEG) [ 18 ]
0.150
0.347
0.669
0.715
0.590
ATM (EEG) [ 15 ]
0.160
0.345
0.734
0.786
0.582
TABLE III: Image reconstruction performance. Metrics are divided into low-level and high-level features, where arrows indicate the direction of better performance.
Baseline
UM
Loss
Mask
Avg (Fusion)
top-1 (std)
top-5 (std)
✓
✗
✗
✗
51.8 (5.7)
84.8 (4.8)
✓
✓
✗
✗
54.7 (6.4)
87.1 (3.9)
✓
✓
✓
✗
60.7 (6.2)
90.4 (3.2)
✓
✓
✓
✓
61.2 (7.2)
90.8 (4.4)
TABLE IV: Ablation study of different modules on the baseline model.
EEG Encoder
Image Encoder
Avg (Fusion)
top-1 (std)
top-5 (std)
CogCap Encoder
Vit-H-14
56.0 (6.7)
87.6 (5.3)
CogCap Encoder
RN50
61.2 (7.2)
90.8 (4.4)
ShallowNet
RN50
37.0 (7.3)
72.6 (8.2)
DeepNet
RN50
24.4 (4.6)
56.8 (7.7)
TSConv
RN50
44.7 (7.5)
79.9 (6.5)
TABLE V: Performance comparison across different EEG and image encoders.
Fig. 4: Qualitative comparison of reconstruction results across different modality configurations and alignment strategies. From top to bottom: the original visual stimulus, results from all modalities, single modalities, and variants without our alignment module. Our full-modality approach effectively integrates complementary features to produce the most consistent reconstructions.
Method
Low-level
High-level
PixCorr ↑
SSIM ↑
Inception ↑
CLIP ↑
SwAV ↓
Baseline Align
0.097
0.192
0.481
0.505
0.760
w/o Align Module
0.103
0.215
0.516
0.483
0.751
CogCapPro (Image)
0.141
0.317
0.773
0.833
0.558
CogCapPro (Depth)
0.122
0.407
0.636
0.643
0.663
CogCapPro (Edge)
0.029
0.130
0.645
0.658
0.735
TABLE VI: Ablation study of modality combinations and alignment modules.
Fig. 5: Top-1 accuracy distribution across spatial and spectral dimensions. The top row illustrates the classification performance across different brain regions (Frontal, Temporal, Central, Parietal, and Occipital), while the bottom row shows the performance across five frequency bands (Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma). Left and right columns represent results for the Things-EEG and Things-MEG datasets, respectively. “All Channels” denotes the integration of all spatial or spectral information.
Fig. 6: Semantic Analysis and Retrieval Visualization. (a) Similarity heatmaps of the fusion modality embeddings, sorted by semantic categories (left) and structural complexity from low to high (right). (b) Top-5 retrieval results for representative stimulus images.
Fig. 7: Visualization of model interpretability. (Top) Topographical maps of raw data and internal model layers (Attention/Convolution). (Middle) Grad-CAM heatmaps comparing CLIP and EEG-based attention across Image, Depth, and Edge modalities. (Bottom) Samples of reconstructed images.
Fig. 8: Visualization of reconstruction limitations. Rows from top to bottom display the original stimulus images and corresponding reconstructions generated using all modalities, image modality, depth modality, and edge modality, respectively.
We present a brain-to-image system that decodes visual stimuli from EEG signals recorded during natural image viewing. Our system addresses two tasks: (1) EEG-to-image retrieval, which ranks the correct stimulus image among 200 candidates given an EEG segment, and (2) EEG-to-image reconstruction, which generates an image consistent with the perceived stimulus. For retrieval, we implement a multi-level blurring approach improved with biologically inspired EVNet features and trained with the InfoNCE loss. Evaluated over 10 random seeds for a single subject, the retrieval model achieves a mean final-epoch Top-1 accuracy of 86.30% and Top-5 accuracy of 98.55%. For reconstruction, we implement CognitionCapturerPro, which aligns EEG representations to multi-modal CLIP embeddings, including image, text, depth, and edge embeddings, and synthesizes images with SDXL-Turbo conditioned via IP-Adapter. Averaged over 10 seeds, the reconstruction model achieves a CLIP score of 0.903 using ViT-H-14, a CLIP score of 0.870 using ViT-L/14, and an SSIM of 0.409. These results demonstrate the feasibility of decoding rich visual representations from EEG signals using modern multi-modal alignment and generative modeling techniques.
Human visual reconstruction aims to reconstruct fine-grained visual stimuli based on subject-provided descriptions and corresponding neural signals. As a widely adopted modality, Electroencephalography (EEG) captures rich visual cognition information, encompassing complex spatial relationships and chromatic details within scenes. However, current approaches are deeply coupled with an alignment framework that forces EEG features to align with text or image semantic representation. The dependency may condense the rich spatial and chromatic details in EEG that achieved mere conditioned image generation rather than high-fidelity visual reconstruction. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Joint-Modal Visual Reconstruction (JMVR) framework. It treats EEG and text as independent modalities for joint learning to preserve EEG-specific information for reconstruction. It further employs a multi-scale EEG encoding strategy to capture both fine- and coarse-grained features, alongside image augmentation to enhance the recovery of perceptual details. Extensive experiments on the THINGS-EEG dataset demonstrate that JMVR achieves SOTA performance against six baseline methods, specifically exhibiting superior capabilities in modeling spatial structure and chromatic fidelity.
Zhijian Gong, Tianren Yao, Wenjia Dong +1
Beijing University of Technology, Beijing · Beijing Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Intelligent System, Beijing
Zero-shot visual decoding from electroencephalography (EEG) aims to infer visual semantics from non-invasive neural recordings, but remains challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio, non-stationarity, and limited spatial resolution of EEG. Existing EEG-vision alignment methods often rely on holistic EEG embeddings, which can obscure the complementary temporal, spectral, and spatial structure underlying visual perception. We introduce a unified multiview EEG representation learning framework for aligning brain responses with visual semantic embeddings. Our method builds an EEG encoder that jointly models three complementary views: input-conditioned state-space temporal dynamics, learnable wavelet-based spectral decomposition for sample-adaptive frequency modeling, and attention-modulated graph learning for structured electrode interactions. The resulting multiview EEG embeddings are fused and aligned with pretrained visual representations in a shared semantic space using contrastive learning with EEG-specific regularization, enabling 200-way zero-shot visual classification. Experiments on THINGS-EEG benchmark show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 54.8% Top-1 and 85.6% Top-5 accuracy in the within-subject setting and 15.3% Top-1 and 45.4% Top-5 accuracy in the cross-subject setting. We further present the first systematic cross-session EEG-image decoding evaluation, achieving 40.8% Top-1 and 78.0% Top-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicitly modeling multiview neural structure improves both semantic alignment and generalization in EEG-based visual decoding.
Salini Yadav, Taveena Lotey, Pravendra Singh +1
Department of CSE IIT Roorkee, India · Department of CSE IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, India