MindDiffuser: Controlled Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity with Semantic and Structural Diffusion

TL;DR

MindDiffuser is a two-stage model that reconstructs images from brain activity by aligning semantic and structural features, surpassing previous methods and demonstrating neurobiological plausibility.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel two-stage approach combining VQ-VAE, CLIP, and Stable Diffusion for controlled image reconstruction from fMRI data.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art on NSD dataset

Achieves cohesive semantic and structural alignment

Demonstrates neurobiological plausibility of the model

Abstract

Reconstructing visual stimuli from brain recordings has been a meaningful and challenging task. Especially, the achievement of precise and controllable image reconstruction bears great significance in propelling the progress and utilization of brain-computer interfaces. Despite the advancements in complex image reconstruction techniques, the challenge persists in achieving a cohesive alignment of both semantic (concepts and objects) and structure (position, orientation, and size) with the image stimuli. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose a two-stage image reconstruction model called MindDiffuser. In Stage 1, the VQ-VAE latent representations and the CLIP text embeddings decoded from fMRI are put into Stable Diffusion, which yields a preliminary image that contains semantic information. In Stage 2, we utilize the CLIP visual feature decoded from fMRI as supervisory information, and continually adjust the two feature vectors decoded in Stage 1 through backpropagation to align the structural information. The results of both qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate that our model has surpassed the current state-of-the-art models on Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD). The subsequent experimental findings corroborate the neurobiological plausibility of the model, as evidenced by the interpretability of the multimodal feature employed, which align with the corresponding brain responses.