The study examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.
By Ni Yang, Rui He, Philipp Homan, Iris Sommer, Davide Staub, Wolfram Hinzen
arXiv:2607. 19394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalizing across subjects remains challenging in invasive neural recordings because electrode configurations, anatomical structures, and neural signal patterns vary substantially across individuals.
By Ji-Hoon Heo, Aleksandra Joanna Wisniewska, Seo-Hyun Lee, Seong-Whan Lee
The paper introduces MD‑SigLIP, a margin‑regularized structured semantic alignment framework that directly aligns brain embeddings with text embeddings in a shared semantic space for retrieval‑based decoding. It builds on duplicate‑aware sigmoid contrastive learning and adds a listwise margin‑regularized term to enforce structured ranking constraints between positive semantic clusters and negative samples. Experiments show that this approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art retrieval performance in both full‑vocabulary and subset evaluation settings.
By Jiaqi Wang, Huawen Hu, Shu Zhang
SCRIBE is a framework that uses a neuroscience-informed semantic space and an ensemble of large language models to generate interpretable, word-level semantic representations of arbitrary text. In a behavioral study with 921 participants, SCRIBE’s representations varied systematically with context and captured 75‑81% of the estimated human noise ceiling. When applied to brain activity recorded while participants listened to naturalistic stories, SCRIBE predicted neural responses in language-selective brain regions better than non-contextual representations and explained unique brain-predictive information beyond syntactic features.
By Camila Kolling, Omer Moussa, Emin \c{C}elik, Mariya Toneva
arXiv:2601.16390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, yet significant performance gaps persist between dominant and non-dominant la...
By Rhitabrat Pokharel, Ameeta Agrawal, Tanay Nagar
With the rapid advancement of large language models, brain-language decoding has achieved remarkable progress. However, it remains unclear whether decoded content genuinely reflects neural representat...
arXiv:2607. 10931v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decoding brain activity is useful for characterizing brain processes and understanding the functional architecture underlying cognition.
By Pierre-Louis Barbarant, Florent Meyniel, Bertrand Thirion
arXiv:2606. 15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders.
By Angeliki Papathanasiou, Jascha Achterberg, Thomas E. Nichols, Rui Ponte Costa
arXiv:2503. 22697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoding sensory experiences from neural activity to reconstruct human-perceived visual stimuli and semantic content remains a challenge in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
By Feihan Feng, Jingxin Nie
The study investigates how a large language model (LLaMA2‑7B) aligns with human brain activity during naturalistic language comprehension by using SCRIBE, an interpretable semantic representation of 65 neurocognitively grounded properties. Variance partitioning on fMRI data from seven participants reveals that shared variance between LLaMA2‑7B and SCRIBE dominates across the brain, yet both representations also contribute unique variance. Further analysis shows that concrete semantic properties correlate more strongly with shared variance, while abstract properties do not show increased unique variance, and ablation experiments demonstrate that multiple semantic dimensions cumulatively influence both shared and unique brain-predictive variance.
By Camila Kolling, Mariya Toneva
arXiv:2610.22961v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Brain alignment of large language models (LLMs) offers a way to investigate representational similarities between LLMs and the human brain during lan...
By Yuko Nakagi, Yuya Chiba, Yasue Kishino
arXiv:2610.07168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Representations of translated sentences are similar in the inner layers of multilingual language models -- an observation connected to the platonic rep...
By Darshil Doshi, Wenjie Zhou, Corinna Elena Wegner, Daniel J. Korchinski, Santiago Acevedo, Matthieu Wyart