SYNAPSE: Neuro-Symbolic Visual Thought-to-Text Decoding via Topological Semantic Denoising
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-05-27
Updated: 2026-08-30
Comments: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The gist: Recent advances in large language models have accelerated open-vocabulary EEG-to-imagined-text decoding, where non-invasive neural activity recorded during visual perception is translated into
Terminology
Abstract
Recent advances in large language models have accelerated open-vocabulary EEG-to-imagined-text decoding, where non-invasive neural activity recorded during visual perception is translated into coherent natural language descriptions of viewed stimuli. However, existing systems remain highly vulnerable to biological noise, where corrupted neural projections induce hallucinated or semantically unstable generation in frozen language models. We introduce SYNAPSE (Symbolic Neural Alignment for Precise Semantic Extraction), a lightweight neuro-symbolic framework that stabilizes neural text generation through inference-time symbolic regularization. By purifying EEG-derived semantic candidates using commonsense graph structure and latent exemplars, SYNAPSE improves semantic stability without end-to-end LLM fine-tuning. Experiments across popular EEG decoding benchmarks and multiple frozen LLM backends demonstrate consistent gains over unconstrained prompting baselines, robustness under object-label ablation, and performance commensurate with substantially more resource-intensive fine-tuned systems, while preserving biometric privacy by localizing raw EEG processing entirely within the encoder stack.
Sources
- GPT-4 Technical Report
- SENSE: Efficient EEG-to-Text via Privacy-Preserving Semantic Retrieval
- Brain decoding: toward real-time reconstruction of visual perception
- OpenAI GPT-5 System Card
- On Creating A Brain-To-Text Decoder
- Brain-to-Text Decoding: A Non-invasive Approach via Typing
- Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation
- ETS: Open Vocabulary Electroencephalography-To-Text Decoding and Sentiment Classification
- LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models
- BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT
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