# Shrinking the Teacher: An Adaptive Teaching Paradigm for Asymmetric EEG-Vision Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [CognitionCapturerPro: Towards High-Fidelity Visual Decoding from EEG/MEG via Multi-modal Information and Asymmetric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12722/) (2026)
- [Brain-Inspired Capture: Evidence-Driven Neuromimetic Perceptual Simulation for Visual Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17927/) (2026)
- [EEG-EditBench: Probing Visual Information in EEG-Image Retrieval Models with Controlled Image Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27857/) (2026)
- [The Visual Target Matters: Learning across the Visual Hierarchy for Brain-to-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24136/) (2026)
- [RPA: Residual Patch-Token Adapter for Image Retrieval from EEG and MEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31698/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Decoding visual features from EEG signals is a central challenge in neuroscience, with cross-modal alignment as the dominant approach. We argue that the relationship between visual and brain modalities is fundamentally asymmetric, characterized by two critical gaps: a Fidelity Gap (stemming from EEG's inherent noise and signal degradation, vs. vision's high-fidelity features) and a Semantic Gap (arising from EEG's shallow conceptual representation, vs. vision's rich semantic depth). Previous methods often overlook this asymmetry, forcing alignment between the two modalities as if they were equal partners and thereby leading to poor generalization. To address this, we propose the adaptive teaching paradigm. This paradigm empowers the ``teacher" modality (vision) to dynamically shrink and adjust its knowledge structure under task guidance, tailoring its semantically dense features to match the ``student" modality (EEG)'s capacity. We implement this paradigm with the ShrinkAdapter, a simple yet effective module featuring a residual-free design and a bottleneck structure. Through extensive experiments, we validate the underlying rationale and effectiveness of our paradigm. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 60.2% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 9.8%. Our work introduces a new perspective for asymmetric alignment: the teacher must shrink and adapt to bridge the vision-brain gap.