# Structured Visual Target Learning For Cross-Subject eeg-to-image retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36971 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36971/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Word Translation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04087/) (2017)
- [Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13181/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Transfer Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Euclidean Space Data Alignment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05464/) (2018)
- [Attention Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15031/) (2026)
- [Bridging the Vision-Brain Gap with an Uncertainty-Aware Blur Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04207/) (2025)
- [NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06836/) (2025)
- [NeuroCLIP: Brain-Inspired Prompt Tuning for EEG-to-Image Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09250/) (2025)
- [Aligning What EEG Can See: Structural Representations for Brain-Vision Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07077/) (2026)
- [Deep Models, Shallow Alignment: Uncovering the Granularity Mismatch in Neural Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21948/) (2026)
- [Subject-Aware Multi-Granularity Alignment for Zero-Shot EEG-to-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17782/) (2026)
- [SATTC: Structure-Aware Label-Free Test-Time Calibration for Cross-Subject EEG-to-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20738/) (2026)
- [Cross-Subject Generalization for EEG Decoding: A Survey of Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27033/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-subject EEG-to-image retrieval requires a neural represen- tation trained on source subjects to remain aligned with a visual embedding space for an unseen subject. Whereas existing methods primarily focus on the EEG side, we address this problem from the perspective of the visual target. Our approach preserves the spatial information of the Perception Encoder, converts its patch grid into a compact set of learned visual views, and aggregates them for each image with a block-structured, content-dependent router. The target is learned jointly with the EEG encoder through contrastive learning with MMD regularization across source subjects. For deployment, we propose a training-free representation refinement that aligns frozen embeddings without updating either encoder. Under leave- one-subject-out evaluation on THINGS-EEG2, the structured target achieves 35.3%/65.6% Top-1/Top-5 accuracy, the best among com- pared methods. Refinement raises this to 48.1%/77.1%, an 18.5% Top-1 gain over the strongest compared method, improving all ten held-out subjects.