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Brain-Grasp: Graph-Based Saliency Priors for Improved FMRI-Based Visual Brain Decoding

May 3, 2026· Mohammad Moradi , Morteza Moradi , Marco Grassia , Giuseppe Mangioni
DOI

Abstract

Recent progress in brain-guided image generation has improved the quality of fMRI-based reconstructions; however, fundamental challenges remain in preserving object-level structure and semantic fidelity. Many existing approaches overlook the spatial arrangement of salient objects, leading to conceptually inconsistent outputs. We propose a saliency-driven decoding framework that employs graph-informed saliency priors to translate structural cues from brain signals into spatial masks. These masks, together with semantic information extracted from embeddings, condition a diffusion model to guide image regeneration, helping preserve object conformity while maintaining natural scene composition. In contrast to pipelines that invoke multiple diffusion stages, our approach relies on a single frozen model, offering a more lightweight yet effective design. Experiments show that this strategy improves both conceptual alignment and structural similarity to the original stimuli, while also introducing a new direction for efficient, interpretable, and structurally grounded brain decoding.
Publication
ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
publication