# Neuro-Symbolic Decoding of Neural Activity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03343/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [The Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner: Interpreting Scenes, Words, and Sentences From Natural Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12584/) (2019)
- [Neural-Symbolic VQA: Disentangling Reasoning from Vision and Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02338/) (2018)
- [Reconstructing the Mind's Eye: fMRI-to-Image with Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18274/) (2023)
- [Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06956/) (2022)
- [Generic decoding of seen and imagined objects using hierarchical visual features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.06479/) (2015)
- [Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11675/) (2023)
- [BOLD5000: A public fMRI dataset of 5000 images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01281/) (2018)
- [NS3D: Neuro-Symbolic Grounding of 3D Objects and Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13483/) (2023)
- [What's Left? Concept Grounding with Logic-Enhanced Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16035/) (2023)
- [UMBRAE: Unified Multimodal Brain Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07202/) (2024)
- [Fine-grain atlases of functional modes for fMRI analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05405/) (2020)
- [NeuroClips: Towards High-fidelity and Smooth fMRI-to-Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19452/) (2024)
- [The Algonauts Project 2025 Challenge: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Multimodal Movies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00504/) (2024)
- [Building Intelligent Agents with Neuro-Symbolic Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06191/) (2025)
- [Decoding Visual Experience and Mapping Semantics through Whole-Brain Analysis Using fMRI Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07121/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose NEURONA, a neuro-symbolic framework for fMRI decoding and concept grounding in neural activity. Leveraging image- and video-based fMRI question-answering datasets, NEURONA learns to decode interacting concepts from visual stimuli based on patterns of fMRI responses, integrating symbolic reasoning and compositional execution with fMRI grounding across brain regions. We demonstrate that incorporating structural priors (e.g., compositional predicate-argument dependencies between concepts) into the decoding process significantly improves both decoding accuracy over precise queries, and notably, generalization to unseen queries at test time. With NEURONA, we highlight neuro-symbolic frameworks as promising tools for understanding neural activity.