# Unidirectional brain-computer interface: Artificial neural network encoding natural images to fMRI response in the visual cortex

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15018/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioral and neural analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00673/) (2022)
- [BOLD5000: A public fMRI dataset of 5000 images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01281/) (2018)
- [The Algonauts Project 2023 Challenge: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Natural Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03198/) (2023)
- [PQLM -- Multilingual Decentralized Portable Quantum Language Model for Privacy Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03221/) (2022)
- [TAToo: Vision-based Joint Tracking of Anatomy and Tool for Skull-base Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14131/) (2022)
- [A New Approach to Extract Fetal Electrocardiogram Using Affine Combination of Adaptive Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11658/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MindSimulator: Exploring Brain Concept Localization via Synthetic FMRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02351/) (2025)
- [SynBrain: Enhancing Visual-to-fMRI Synthesis via Probabilistic Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10298/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have catalyzed progress across various domains, its full potential in understanding visual perception remains underexplored. We propose an artificial neural network dubbed VISION, an acronym for "Visual Interface System for Imaging Output of Neural activity," to mimic the human brain and show how it can foster neuroscientific inquiries. Using visual and contextual inputs, this multimodal model predicts the brain's functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan response to natural images. VISION successfully predicts human hemodynamic responses as fMRI voxel values to visual inputs with an accuracy exceeding state-of-the-art performance by 45%. We further probe the trained networks to reveal representational biases in different visual areas, generate experimentally testable hypotheses, and formulate an interpretable metric to associate these hypotheses with cortical functions. With both a model and evaluation metric, the cost and time burdens associated with designing and implementing functional analysis on the visual cortex could be reduced. Our work suggests that the evolution of computational models may shed light on our fundamental understanding of the visual cortex and provide a viable approach toward reliable brain-machine interfaces.