BrainCLIP: Brain Representation via CLIP for Generic Natural Visual Stimulus Decoding
Yongqiang Ma, Yulong Liu, Liangjun Chen, Guibo Zhu, Badong Chen, Nanning Zheng
Abstract
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) presents challenges due to limited paired samples and low signal-to-noise ratios, particularly in tasks involving reconstructing natural images or decoding their semantic content. To address these challenges, we introduce BrainCLIP, an innovative fMRI-based brain decoding model. BrainCLIP leverages Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training's (CLIP) cross-modal generalization abilities to bridge brain activity, images, and text for the first time. Our experiments demonstrate CLIP's effectiveness in diverse brain decoding tasks, including zero-shot visual category decoding, fMRI-image/text alignment, and fMRI-to-image generation. The core objective of BrainCLIP is to train a mapping network that translates fMRI patterns into a unified CLIP embedding space, achieved through visual and textual supervision integration. Our experiments highlight that this approach significantly enhances performance in tasks such as fMRI-text alignment and fMRI-based image generation. Notably, BrainCLIP surpasses BraVL, a recent multi-modal method, in zero-shot visual category decoding. Moreover, BrainCLIP demonstrates strong capability in reconstructing visual stimuli with high semantic fidelity, competing favorably with state-of-the-art methods in capturing high-level semantic features during fMRI-based natural image reconstruction.