Title: Towards Interpretable Visual Decoding with Attention to Brain Representations
Primary area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science
Keywords: Brain Decoding, Visual Reconstruction, fMRI, Stable Diffusion, Interpretability

Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that complex visual stimuli can be decoded from human brain activity using deep generative models, helping brain science researchers interpret how the brain represents real-world scenes. However, most current approaches leverage mapping brain signals into intermediate image or text feature spaces before guiding the generative process, masking the effect of contributions from different brain areas on the final reconstruction output. In this work, we propose \textit{NeuroAdapter}, a visual decoding framework that directly conditions a latent diffusion model on brain representations, bypassing the need for intermediate feature spaces. Our method demonstrates competitive visual reconstruction quality on public fMRI datasets compared to prior work, while providing greater transparency into how brain signals shape the generation process. To this end, we contribute an Image–Brain BI-directional interpretability framework (\textit{IBBI}) which investigates cross-attention mechanisms across diffusion denoising steps to reveal how different cortical areas influence the unfolding generative trajectory. Our results highlight the potential of end-to-end brain-to-image decoding and establish a path toward interpreting diffusion models through the lens of visual neuroscience.

TL;DR: The paper presents NeuroAdapter, which reconstructs images directly from brain activity and uses IBBI interpretability framework to show how brain regions influence generative trajectory.