We are pleased to announce that a paper by Ms. Shirin Vafaei, a fifth-year PhD student in our lab, was published in Communications Biology on January 3.

Title of the paper: Brain-aligning of semantic vectors improves neural decoding of visual stimuli

Brain-aligning of semantic vectors improves neural decoding of visual stimuli

In brain decoding, which aims to predict stimuli from neural activity, conventional image- and text-based feature vectors are misaligned with neural representations, leading to reduced accuracy.
In this study, we propose “brain-aligned vectors,” which fine-tune these feature vectors to better match the structure of neural representations.
Moreover, this method, trained on fMRI data, improved decoding accuracy across fMRI, MEG, and ECoG datasets.

Congratulations, Ms. Vafaei!