SIMON: Saliency-aware Integrative Multi-view Object-centric Neural Decoding

TL;DR

SIMON introduces a saliency-aware multi-view framework for zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval, emphasizing informative object regions to improve accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel saliency-aware sampling approach that enhances EEG-to-image retrieval by integrating multi-view visual features aligned with human attention.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 69.7% intra-subject.

Outperforms recent baselines in inter-subject retrieval.

Demonstrates robustness across sampling granularity and encoder backbones.

Abstract

Recent EEG-to-image retrieval methods leverage pretrained vision encoders and foveation-inspired priors, but typically assume a fixed, center-focused view. This center bias conflicts with content-driven human attention, creating a geometric-semantic dissociation between visual features and EEG responses. We propose SIMON, a saliency-aware multi-view framework for zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval. SIMON combines foreground segmentation and saliency prediction to select fixation centers via Saliency-Aware Sampling (SAS), then generates foveated views that emphasize informative object regions while suppressing background clutter. On THINGS-EEG, SIMON achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intra-subject and inter-subject settings, reaching an average Top-1 accuracy of 69.7% and 19.6%, respectively, consistently outperforming recent competitive baselines. Analyses across sampling granularity, EEG channel topology, and visual/brain encoder backbones further support the robustness of saliency-aware multi-view integration. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/simonlink666/SIMON.