Toward Generalizing Visual Brain Decoding to Unseen Subjects

Visual brain decoding aims to decode visual information from human brain activities. Despite the great progress, one critical limitation of current brain decoding research lies in the lack of generalization capability to unseen subjects. Prior work typically focuses on decoding brain activity of individuals based on the observation that different subjects exhibit different brain activities, while it remains unclear whether brain decoding can be generalized to unseen subjects. This study aims to answer this question. We first consolidate an image-fMRI dataset consisting of stimulus-image and fMRI-response pairs, involving 177 subjects in the movie-viewing task of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). This dataset allows us to investigate the brain decoding performance with the increase of participants. We then present a learning paradigm that applies uniform processing across all subjects, instead of employing different network heads or tokenizers for individuals as in previous methods, so that we can accommodate a large number of subjects to explore the generalization capability across different subjects. A series of experiments are conducted and we have the following findings. First, the network exhibits clear generalization capabilities with the increase of training subjects. Second, the generalization capability is common to popular network architectures (MLP, CNN and Transformer). Third, the generalization performance is affected by the similarity between subjects. Our findings reveal the inherent similarities in brain activities across individuals. With the emergence of larger and more comprehensive datasets, it is possible to train a brain decoding foundation model in the future. Codes and models can be found at https://github.com/Xiangtaokong/TGBD.