Demo Data from EDBT 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Sara Cammarota
dblp:436/0173
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
3D vision · 50% Trustworthy machine learning · 25% Generative modeling · 25% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 4, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Computer vision › 3D vision
brain decoding |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Bridging Brains and Concepts: Interpretable Visual Decoding from fMRI with Semantic Bottlenecks · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computer vision › 3D vision › brain decoding
brain visual decoding |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Bridging Brains and Concepts: Interpretable Visual Decoding from fMRI with Semantic Bottlenecks · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Bridging Brains and Concepts: Interpretable Visual Decoding from fMRI with Semantic Bottlenecks · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
interpretability |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Bridging Brains and Concepts: Interpretable Visual Decoding from fMRI with Semantic Bottlenecks · NeurIPS 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
ridge regression · 0.9diffusion model · 0.9CLIP embedding · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Bridging Brains and Concepts: Interpretable Visual Decoding from fMRI with Semantic BottlenecksabstractDecoding of visual stimuli from noninvasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) has advanced rapidly in the last years; yet, most high-performing brain decoding models rely on complicated, non-interpretable latent spaces. In this study we present an interpretable brain decoding framework that inserts a semantic bottleneck into BrainDiffuser, a well established, simple and linear decoding pipeline. We firstly produce a $214-\text{dimensional}$ binary interpretable space $\mathcal{L}$ for images, in which each dimension answers to a specific question about the image (e.g., "Is there a person?", "Is it outdoors?"). A first ridge regression maps voxel activity to this semantic space. Because this mapping is linear, its weight matrix can be visualized as maps of voxel importance for each dimension of $\mathcal{L}$, revealing which cortical regions influence mostly each semantic dimension. A second regression then transforms these concept vectors into CLIP embeddings required to produce the final decoded image, conditioning the BrainDiffuser model. We found that voxel-wise weight maps for individual questions are highly consistent with canonical category-selective regions in the visual cortex (face, bodies, places, words), simultaneously revealing that activation distributions, not merely location, bear semantic meaning in the brain. Visual brain decoding performances are only slightly lower compared to the original BrainDiffuser metrics (e.g., the CLIP similarity is decreased by $\leq 4$% for the four subjects), yet offering substantial gains in interpretability and neuroscientific insights. These results show that our interpretable brain decoding pipeline enables voxel-level analysis of semantic representations in the human brain without sacrificing decoding accuracy. Sara Cammarota, Matteo Ferrante, Nicola Toschi |
NeurIPS | 1 |