SCORE: Subject Coordinate Recovery for Label-Free Cross-Subject EEG-to-Image Retrieval

2026-08-19

AI Summary

本文提出SCORE方法，通过恢复意识源训练和坐标对齐解决跨主体EEG到图像检索准确性低的问题，无需目标标签即可提高检索精度。

Abstract

Accurate visual decoding can reveal how the brain represents visual information and recover perceived content from neural signals such as electroencephalography (EEG), with potential for neural communication. However, current EEG-to-image retrieval methods perform far below their within-subject counterparts for new users without labeled calibration, limiting real-world deployment. To understand this gap, we analyze EEG features across subjects and find that different subjects preserve similar relationships among concepts but express them along different coordinate directions. We therefore propose Subject Coordinate Recovery (SCORE), a target label-free framework combining recovery-aware source training with coordinate alignment at deployment. During training, SCORE aligns source subject EEG with a common image space and simulates unseen-subject recovery through source-only episodes. At deployment, with both encoders frozen, SCORE selects reliable EEG-image landmarks through hubness-corrected matching and estimates an orthogonal transformation to recover target EEG coordinates without source data or target labels. In 200-way retrieval on two public benchmarks, SCORE outperforms the unadapted baseline for every target subject and achieves the best overall accuracy. It reaches 53.23%/83.55% and 12.01%/32.16% Top-1/Top-5 on THINGS-EEG2 and Alljoined-1.6M, respectively, surpassing the strongest baselines by 17.45/15.70 and 3.08/4.62 percentage points. Without target labels or encoder updates, SCORE brings brain-based visual decoding closer to robust, practical, low-latency deployment across users.

Problem

• EEG-to-image retrieval
• cross-subject
• label-free
• neural signals
• visual decoding

Innovation

• Subject Coordinate Recovery
• label-free
• cross-subject EEG-to-image retrieval
• coordinate alignment
• hubness-corrected matching