MoRE-Brain: Routed Mixture of Experts for Interpretable and Generalizable Cross-Subject fMRI Visual Decoding

YUXIANG WEI, Yanteng Zhang, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Vince Calhoun

TreNDS· University of Alabama at Birmingham· Oak Ridge National Laboratory

brain decoding; visual reconstruction; fMRI

⋅ NeurIPS ⋅ Project Page ⋅Poster ⋅OpenReview

Abstract

Decoding visual experiences from fMRI offers a powerful avenue to understand human perception and develop advanced brain-computer interfaces. However, current progress often prioritizes maximizing reconstruction fidelity while overlooking interpretability, an essential aspect for deriving neuroscientific insight.

To address this gap, we propose MoRE-Brain, a neuro-inspired framework designed for high-fidelity, adaptable, and interpretable visual reconstruction. MoRE-Brain uniquely employs a hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts architecture where distinct experts process fMRI signals from functionally related voxel groups, mimicking specialized brain networks. The experts are first trained to encode fMRI into the frozen CLIP space. A finetuned diffusion model then synthesizes images, guided by expert outputs through a novel dual-stage routing mechanism that dynamically weighs expert contributions across the diffusion process.

MoRE-Brain offers three main advancements:

First, it introduces a novel Mixture-of-Experts architecture grounded in brain network principles for neuro-decoding.
Second, it achieves efficient cross-subject generalization by sharing core expert networks while adapting only subject-specific routers.
Third, it provides enhanced mechanistic insight, as the explicit routing reveals precisely how different modeled brain regions shape the semantic and spatial attributes of the reconstructed image.

Extensive experiments validate MoRE-Brain’s high reconstruction fidelity, with bottleneck analyses further demonstrating its effective utilization of fMRI signals, distinguishing genuine neural decoding from over-reliance on generative priors. Consequently, MoRE-Brain marks a substantial advance towards more generalizable and interpretable fMRI-based visual decoding.