The Wisdom of a Crowd of Brains: A Universal Brain Encoder
<|reference_start|>The Wisdom of a Crowd of Brains: A Universal Brain Encoder: Image-to-fMRI encoding is important for both neuroscience research and practical applications. However, such "Brain-Encoders" have been typically trained per-subject and per fMRI-dataset, thus restricted to very limited training data. In this paper we propose a Universal Brain-Encoder, which can be trained jointly on data from many different subjects/datasets/machines. What makes this possible is our new voxel-centric Encoder architecture, which learns a unique "voxel-embedding" per brain-voxel. Our Encoder trains to predict the response of each brain-voxel on every image, by directly computing the cross-attention between the brain-voxel embedding and multi-level deep image features. This voxel-centric architecture allows the functional role of each brain-voxel to naturally emerge from the voxel-image cross-attention. We show the power of this approach to (i) combine data from multiple different subjects (a "Crowd of Brains") to improve each individual brain-encoding, (ii) quick & effective Transfer-Learning across subjects, datasets, and machines (e.g., 3-Tesla, 7-Tesla), with few training examples, and (iii) use the learned voxel-embeddings as a powerful tool to explore brain functionality (e.g., what is encoded where in the brain).<|reference_end|>
@article{beliy2024the,
    title={The Wisdom of a Crowd of Brains: A Universal Brain Encoder},
    author={Roman Beliy, Navve Wasserman, Amit Zalcher, Michal Irani},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.12179},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.12179},
    primaryClass={cs.CV}
}