SEED: Towards More Accurate Semantic Evaluation for Visual Brain Decoding

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission6900 Authors

Keywords: Brain Decoding, fMRI, Evaluation Metric

Abstract:

We present SEED ($\textbf{Se}$mantic $\textbf{E}$valuation for Visual Brain $\textbf{D}$ecoding), a novel metric for evaluating the semantic decoding performance of visual brain decoding models. It integrates three complementary metrics, each capturing a different aspect of semantic similarity between images inspired by neuroscientific findings. Using carefully crowd-sourced human evaluation data, we demonstrate that SEED achieves the highest alignment with human evaluation, outperforming other widely used metrics.
Through the evaluation of existing visual brain decoding models with SEED, we further reveal that crucial information is often lost in translation, even in the state-of-the-art models that achieve near-perfect scores on existing metrics. This finding highlights the limitations of current evaluation practices and provides guidance for future improvements in decoding models.
Finally, to facilitate further research, we open-source the human evaluation data, encouraging the development of more advanced evaluation methods for brain decoding.

Primary Area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science

Submission Number: 6900