# NeuralDiffuser: Neuroscience-inspired Diffusion Guidance for fMRI Visual Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Survey on fMRI-based Brain Decoding for Reconstructing Multimodal Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15978/) (2025)
- [HyFI: Hyperbolic Feature Interpolation for Brain-Vision Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22721/) (2026)
- [Learning Brain Representation with Hierarchical Visual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07495/) (2026)
- [Towards Interpretable Visual Decoding with Attention to Brain Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23566/) (2025)
- [SynMind: Reducing Semantic Hallucination in fMRI-Based Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17857/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Brain Decoding with CLIP: The Role of Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03165/) (2026)
- [Seeing Through the Brain: New Insights from Decoding Visual Stimuli with fMRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16196/) (2025)
- [Moving Beyond Diffusion: Hierarchy-to-Hierarchy Autoregression for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22335/) (2025)
- [Hi-DREAM: Brain-Inspired Hierarchical Diffusion for fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction via ROI Encoder and VisuAl Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11437/) (2025)
- [FSDBN: Foreground-Aware EEG-Visual Alignment via Dynamic Brain Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18344/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing visual stimuli from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI enables fine-grained retrieval of brain activity. However, the accurate reconstruction of diverse details, including structure, background, texture, color, and more, remains challenging. The stable diffusion models inevitably result in the variability of reconstructed images, even under identical conditions. To address this challenge, we first uncover the neuroscientific perspective of diffusion methods, which primarily involve top-down creation using pre-trained knowledge from extensive image datasets, but tend to lack detail-driven bottom-up perception, leading to a loss of faithful details. In this paper, we propose NeuralDiffuser, which incorporates primary visual feature guidance to provide detailed cues in the form of gradients. This extension of the bottom-up process for diffusion models achieves both semantic coherence and detail fidelity when reconstructing visual stimuli. Furthermore, we have developed a novel guidance strategy for reconstruction tasks that ensures the consistency of repeated outputs with original images rather than with various outputs. Extensive experimental results on the Natural Senses Dataset (NSD) qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the advancement of NeuralDiffuser by comparing it against baseline and state-of-the-art methods horizontally, as well as conducting longitudinal ablation studies.