Multi-view Multi-label Fine-grained Emotion Decoding from Human Brain Activity

Decoding emotional states from human brain activity plays an important role in brain-computer interfaces. Existing emotion decoding methods still have two main limitations: one is only decoding a single emotion category from a brain activity pattern and the decoded emotion categories are coarse-grained, which is inconsistent with the complex emotional expression of human; the other is ignoring the discrepancy of emotion expression between the left and right hemispheres of human brain. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view multi-label hybrid model for fine-grained emotion decoding (up to 80 emotion categories) which can learn the expressive neural representations and predicting multiple emotional states simultaneously. Specifically, the generative component of our hybrid model is parametrized by a multi-view variational auto-encoder, in which we regard the brain activity of left and right hemispheres and their difference as three distinct views, and use the product of expert mechanism in its inference network. The discriminative component of our hybrid model is implemented by a multi-label classification network with an asymmetric focal loss. For more accurate emotion decoding, we first adopt a label-aware module for emotion-specific neural representations learning and then model the dependency of emotional states by a masked self-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on two visually evoked emotional datasets show the superiority of our method.

Decoding Visual Neural Representations by Multimodal Learning of Brain-Visual-Linguistic Features

Decoding human visual neural representations is a challenging task with great scientific significance in revealing vision-processing mechanisms and developing brain-like intelligent machines. Most existing methods are difficult to generalize to novel categories that have no corresponding neural data for training. The two main reasons are 1) the under-exploitation of the multimodal semantic knowledge underlying the neural data and 2) the small number of paired (stimuli-responses) training data. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a generic neural decoding method called BraVL that uses multimodal learning of brain-visual-linguistic features. We focus on modeling the relationships between brain, visual and linguistic features via multimodal deep generative models. Specifically, we leverage the mixture-of-product-of-experts formulation to infer a latent code that enables a coherent joint generation of all three modalities. To learn a more consistent joint representation and improve the data efficiency in the case of limited brain activity data, we exploit both intra- and inter-modality mutual information maximization regularization terms. In particular, our BraVL model can be trained under various semi-supervised scenarios to incorporate the visual and textual features obtained from the extra categories. Finally, we construct three trimodal matching datasets, and the extensive experiments lead to some interesting conclusions and cognitive insights: 1) decoding novel visual categories from human brain activity is practically possible with good accuracy; 2) decoding models using the combination of visual and linguistic features perform much better than those using either of them alone; 3) visual perception may be accompanied by linguistic influences to represent the semantics of visual stimuli. Code and data: https://github.com/ChangdeDu/BraVL.