Human’s perception of the visual world is shaped by the stereo processing of 3D information. Understanding how the brain perceives and processes 3D visual stimuli in the real world has been a longstanding endeavor in neuroscience. Towards this goal, we introduce a new neuroscience task: decoding 3D visual perception from EEG signals, a neuroimaging technique that enables real-time monitoring of neural dynamics enriched with complex visual cues. To provide the essential benchmark, we first present EEG-3D, a pioneering dataset featuring multimodal analysis data and extensive EEG recordings from 12 subjects viewing 72 categories of 3D objects rendered in both videos and images. Furthermore, we propose Neuro-3D, a 3D visual decoding framework based on EEG signals. This framework adaptively integrates EEG features derived from static and dynamic stimuli to learn complementary and robust neural representations, which are subsequently utilized to recover both the shape and color of 3D objects through the proposed diffusion-based colored point cloud decoder. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore EEG-based 3D visual decoding. Experiments indicate that Neuro-3D not only reconstructs colored 3D objects with high fidelity, but also learns effective neural representations that enable insightful brain region analysis. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/gzq17/neuro-3D.

Brain decoding aims to reconstruct visual perception of human subject from fMRI signals, which is crucial for understanding brain’s perception mechanisms. Existing methods are confined to the single-subject paradigm due to substantial brain variability, which leads to weak generalization across individuals and incurs high training costs, exacerbated by limited availability of fMRI data. To address these challenges, we propose MindAligner, an explicit functional alignment framework for cross-subject brain decoding from limited fMRI data. The proposed MindAligner enjoys several merits. First, we learn a Brain Transfer Matrix (BTM) that projects the brain signals of an arbitrary new subject to one of the known subjects, enabling seamless use of pre-trained decoding models. Second, to facilitate reliable BTM learning, a Brain Functional Alignment module is proposed to perform soft cross-subject brain alignment under different visual stimuli with a multi-level brain alignment loss, uncovering fine-grained functional correspondences with high interpretability. Experiments indicate that MindAligner not only outperforms existing methods in visual decoding under data-limited conditions, but also provides valuable neuroscience insights in cross-subject functional analysis. The code will be made publicly available.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance across domains, their long-context capabilities are limited by transient neural activations causing information decay and unstructured feed-forward network (FFN) weights leading to semantic fragmentation. Inspired by the brain’s working memory and cortical modularity, we propose PaceLLM, featuring two innovations: (1) a Persistent Activity (PA) Mechanism that mimics prefrontal cortex (PFC) neurons’ persistent firing by introducing an activation-level memory bank to dynamically retrieve, reuse, and update critical FFN states, addressing contextual decay; and (2) Cortical Expert (CE) Clustering that emulates task-adaptive neural specialization to reorganize FFN weights into semantic modules, establishing cross-token dependencies and mitigating fragmentation. Extensive evaluations show that PaceLLM achieves 6% improvement on LongBench’s Multi-document QA and 12.5–17.5% performance gains on $\infty$-Bench tasks, while extending measurable context length to 200K tokens in Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) tests. This work pioneers brain-inspired LLM optimization and is complementary to other works. Besides, it can be generalized to any model and enhance their long-context performance and interpretability without structural overhauls.

Deciphering how visual stimuli are transformed into cortical responses is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. This visual-to-neural mapping is inherently a one-to-many relationship, as identical visual inputs reliably evoke variable hemodynamic responses across trials, contexts, and subjects. However, existing deterministic methods struggle to simultaneously model this biological variability while capturing the underlying functional consistency that encodes stimulus information. To address these limitations, we propose SynBrain, a generative framework that simulates the transformation from visual semantics to neural responses in a probabilistic and biologically interpretable manner. SynBrain introduces two key components: (i) BrainVAE models neural representations as continuous probability distributions via probabilistic learning while maintaining functional consistency through visual semantic constraints; (ii) A Semantic-to-Neural Mapper acts as a semantic transmission pathway, projecting visual semantics into the neural response manifold to facilitate high-fidelity fMRI synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that SynBrain surpasses state-of-the-art methods in subject-specific visual-to-fMRI encoding performance. Furthermore, SynBrain adapts efficiently to new subjects with few-shot data and synthesizes high-quality fMRI signals that are effective in improving data-limited fMRI-to-image decoding performance. Beyond that, SynBrain reveals functional consistency across trials and subjects, with synthesized signals capturing interpretable patterns shaped by biological neural variability. Our code is available at https://github.com/MichaelMaiii/SynBrain.

Understanding and decoding human brain activity from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a fundamental problem in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, with applications ranging from cognition and emotion recognition to clinical diagnosis and brain–computer interfaces. While recent EEG foundation models have made progress in generalized brain decoding by leveraging unified architectures and large-scale pretraining, they inherit a scale-agnostic dense modeling paradigm from NLP and vision. This design overlooks an intrinsic property of neural activity—cross-scale spatiotemporal structure. Different EEG task patterns span a broad range of temporal and spatial scales, from brief neural activations to slow-varying rhythms, and from localized cortical activations to large-scale distributed interactions. Ignoring this diversity may lead to suboptimal representations and weakened generalization ability. To address these limitations, we propose CSBrain, a Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Brain foundation model for generalized EEG decoding. CSBrain introduces two key components: (i) Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Tokenization (CST), which aggregates multi-scale features within localized temporal windows and anatomical brain regions into compact scale-aware token representations; and (ii) Structured Sparse Attention (SSA), which models cross-window and cross-region dependencies for diverse decoding tasks, further enriching scale diversities while eliminating the spurious dependencies. CST and SSA are alternately stacked to progressively integrate cross-scale spatiotemporal dependencies. Extensive experiments across 11 representative EEG tasks and 16 datasets demonstrate that CSBrain consistently outperforms both task-specific models and strong foundation baselines. These results establish cross-scale modeling as a key inductive bias for generalized EEG decoding and highlight CSBrain as a robust backbone for future brain–AI research.