Organizations: School of Mathematics, Taiyuan University of Technology, Shanxi 030024, China · College of Artificial Intelligence, Taiyuan University of Technology, Shanxi 030024, China · National Human Genetics Resource Center, National Research Institute for Family Planning, Beijing 100000, China · Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China
Visual decoding of neurophysiological signals is a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and computational neuroscience. However, current approaches are often constrained by the systematic and stochastic gaps between neural and visual modalities, largely neglecting the intrinsic computational mechanisms of the Human Visual System (HVS). To address this, we propose Brain-Inspired Capture (BI-Cap), a neuromimetic perceptual simulation paradigm that aligns these modalities by emulating HVS processing. Specifically, we construct a neuromimetic pipeline comprising four biologically plausible dynamic and static transformations, coupled with Mutual Information (MI)-guided dynamic blur regulation to simulate adaptive visual processing. Furthermore, to mitigate the inherent non-stationarity of neural activity, we introduce an evidence-driven latent space representation. This formulation explicitly models uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust neural embeddings. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval across two public benchmarks demonstrate that BI-Cap substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative gains of 9.2% and 8.0%, respectively. We have released the source code on GitHub through the link https://github.com/flysnow1024/BI-Cap.
EEG-based visual neural decoding aims to align neural responses with visual stimuli for tasks such as image retrieval. However, limited paired data and a fundamental mismatch between high-fidelity digital images and biological visual perception - distorted by retinotopic mapping and subject-specific neuroanatomy - severely impede cross-modal alignment. To address this, we propose MB2L, a Multi-Level Bidirectional Biomimetic Learning framework that incorporates structured physiological inductive biases into representation learning. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Blur with Visual Priors to mitigate perceptual-structural mismatch by reweighting visual inputs according to retinotopic priors. We further propose Biomimetic Visual Feature Extraction to learn multi-level visual representations consistent with hierarchical cortical processing, enhancing subject-invariant encoding. These modules are jointly optimized via Multi-level Bidirectional Contrastive Learning, which aligns EEG and visual features in a shared semantic space through bidirectional contrastive objectives. Experiments show MB2L achieves 80.5% Top-1 and 97.6% Top-5 accuracy on zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval, significantly outperforming prior methods and demonstrating strong generalization across subjects and experimental settings.
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.
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 static visual features, 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 leverages neural oscillation priors and the information bottleneck mechanism 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.