Shrinking the Teacher: An Adaptive Teaching Paradigm for Asymmetric EEG-Vision Alignment
This work addresses the challenge of cross-modal alignment in neuroscience for EEG-vision decoding, introducing a novel paradigm that improves generalization by adapting to asymmetry, though it is incremental in its specific domain application.
The paper tackles the problem of decoding visual features from EEG signals by addressing the asymmetric relationship between EEG and vision, proposing an adaptive teaching paradigm that allows the vision modality to adjust its features to match EEG's capacity, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 60.2% on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval, which is 9.8% higher than previous state-of-the-art methods.
Decoding visual features from EEG signals is a central challenge in neuroscience, with cross-modal alignment as the dominant approach. We argue that the relationship between visual and brain modalities is fundamentally asymmetric, characterized by two critical gaps: a Fidelity Gap (stemming from EEG's inherent noise and signal degradation, vs. vision's high-fidelity features) and a Semantic Gap (arising from EEG's shallow conceptual representation, vs. vision's rich semantic depth). Previous methods often overlook this asymmetry, forcing alignment between the two modalities as if they were equal partners and thereby leading to poor generalization. To address this, we propose the adaptive teaching paradigm. This paradigm empowers the ``teacher" modality (vision) to dynamically shrink and adjust its knowledge structure under task guidance, tailoring its semantically dense features to match the ``student" modality (EEG)'s capacity. We implement this paradigm with the ShrinkAdapter, a simple yet effective module featuring a residual-free design and a bottleneck structure. Through extensive experiments, we validate the underlying rationale and effectiveness of our paradigm. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 60.2\% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 9.8\%. Our work introduces a new perspective for asymmetric alignment: the teacher must shrink and adapt to bridge the vision-brain gap.