Subject-Aware Multi-Granularity Alignment for Zero-Shot EEG-to-Image Retrieval

Abstract

Decoding visual content from electroencephalography (EEG) is important for understanding neural visual representations and developing non-invasive brain-computer interfaces. Existing approaches mainly improve EEG representation learning and cross-modal alignment while treating pretrained visual representations as fixed supervision targets. However, pretrained vision models organize information hierarchically, with different depths encoding complementary structural and semantic information, and the visual granularity most compatible with EEG may vary across subjects. To address this issue, we propose Subject-Aware Multi-Granularity Alignment (SAMGA), which makes visual-target construction an explicit part of EEG-visual alignment. SAMGA constructs adaptive visual supervision from multiple intermediate representations and models EEG-compatible visual granularity through a global granularity prior with subject-dependent residual calibration, enabling subject-aware training and subject-agnostic inference. Based on the resulting adaptive target, a coarse-to-fine alignment strategy first organizes global cross-modal geometry and then refines instance-level retrieval discrimination. On THINGS-EEG, SAMGA improves Top-1 retrieval accuracy over the strongest competing method by 8.7 percentage points under intra-subject evaluation and 12.0 percentage points under leave-one-subject-out evaluation. These results support a broader view of neural-visual alignment, in which performance depends not only on how neural representations are mapped, but also on what visual representations define their supervision.