NeuralDiffuser: Neuroscience-Inspired Diffusion Guidance for fMRI Visual Reconstruction

Abstract

Reconstructing visual stimuli from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) enables fine-grained retrieval of brain activity. However, the accurate reconstruction of diverse details, including structure, background, texture, color, and more, remains challenging. The stable diffusion models inevitably result in the variability of reconstructed images, even under identical conditions. To address this challenge, we first uncover the neuroscientific perspective of diffusion methods, which primarily involve top-down creation using pre-trained knowledge from extensive image datasets, but tend to lack detail-driven bottom-up perception, leading to a loss of faithful details. In this paper, we propose NeuralDiffuser, which incorporates primary visual feature guidance to provide detailed cues in the form of gradients. This extension of the bottom-up process for diffusion models achieves both semantic coherence and detail fidelity when reconstructing visual stimuli. Furthermore, we have developed a novel guidance strategy for reconstruction tasks that ensures the consistency of repeated outputs with original images rather than with various outputs. Extensive experimental results on the Natural Senses Dataset (NSD) qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the advancement of NeuralDiffuser by comparing it against baseline and state-of-the-art methods horizontally, as well as conducting longitudinal ablation studies. Code can be available on https://github.com/HaoyyLi/NeuralDiffuser.