# SUP-MCRL: Subject-aware Unified Pseudo-feature Coded Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG Visual Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16615/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Decoding Natural Images from EEG for Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13234/) (2023)
- [Visual Decoding and Reconstruction via EEG Embeddings with Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07721/) (2024)
- [Decoding Visual Neural Representations by Multimodal Learning of Brain-Visual-Linguistic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06756/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Vision-Brain Gap with an Uncertainty-Aware Blur Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04207/) (2025)
- [Neuro-3D: Towards 3D Visual Decoding from EEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12248/) (2024)
- [Visual Neural Decoding via Improved Visual-EEG Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06788/) (2024)
- [Neural-MCRL: Neural Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG-based Visual Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17337/) (2024)
- [NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06836/) (2025)
- [A Tale of Single-channel Electroencephalogram: Devices, Datasets, Signal Processing, Applications, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14850/) (2024)
- [EEG-ITNet: An Explainable Inception Temporal Convolutional Network for Motor Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06947/) (2022)
- [Linguistics and Human Brain: A Perspective of Computational Neuroscience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08275/) (2026)
- [Spatial-Functional awareness Transformer-based graph archetype contrastive learning for Decoding Visual Neural Representations from EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24761/) (2025)
- [DTP-Net: Learning to Reconstruct EEG signals in Time-Frequency Domain by Multi-scale Feature Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09417/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Motor Imagery Decoding in Brain Computer Interfaces using Riemann Tangent Space Mapping and Cross Frequency Coupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19198/) (2023)
- [LEL: Lipschitz Continuity Constrained Ensemble Learning for Efficient EEG-Based Intra-subject Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09156/) (2025)
- [EEG2Vision: A Multimodal EEG-Based Framework for 2D Visual Reconstruction in Cognitive Neuroscience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08063/) (2026)
- [STAMBRIDGE: Spectral-Temporal Amplitude-aware Mid-Feature Bridge for EEG Visual Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23137/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces exhibit significant performance degradation when moving from controlled laboratory stimuli to real-world natural images. This degradation occurs because conventional multimodal contrastive representation learning models focus exclusively on optimizing geometric distance alignment, thereby failing to account for semantic consistency and inter-subject variability in neural representation and selective attention. As a result, these models are prone to producing spurious zero-shot matches. To address these limitations, we propose SUP-MCRL, a unified framework integrating three collaborative mechanisms: (1) a Semantic-entity Aware Visual Encoder (SAVE) that learns spatial attention to extract semantic content without relying on pre-trained saliency models; (2) a Unified EEG Enhancer (UEE) that employs multi-scale atrous convolutions and inter-band attention for adaptive cross-subject robustness; and (3) a Prototype-based Progressive Augmenter (PPA) that maintains an EMA-updated pseudo-feature pool to prevent representation collapse. Zero-shot experiments on the THINGS-EEG achieve 66.0%/91.9% (Top-1/Top-5) intra-subject and 24.0%/52.9% LOSO accuracy, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art methods and demonstrating that structured alignment supervision is key to overcoming the limitations of cross-modal decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/SUP-MCRL.