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currentscurrents t1_jasxijr wrote

I'm a wee bit cautious.

Their test set is a set of patients, not images, so their MRI->latent space model has seen every one of the 10,000 images in the dataset. Couldn't it simply have learned to classify them? Previous work has very successfully classified objects based on brain activity.

How much information are they actually getting out of the brain? They're using StableDiffusion to create the images, which has a lot of world knowledge about images pretrained into it. I wish there was a way to measure how of the output image is coming from the MRI scan vs from StableDiffusion's world knowledge.

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OrangeYouGlad100 t1_jatsw72 wrote

> so their MRI->latent space model has seen every one of the 10,000 images in the dataset

Are you sure about that? I wasn't able to understand their test method from the paper, but it sounds like they held out some images from training

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currentscurrents t1_jatvmtm wrote

You're right, I misread it. I thought they held out 4 patients for tests. But upon rereading, their dataset only had 4 patients total and they held out the set of images that were seen by all of them.

>NSD provides data acquired from a 7-Tesla fMRI scanner over 30–40 sessions during which each subject viewed three repetitions of 10,000 images. We analyzed data for four of the eight subjects who completed all imaging sessions (subj01, subj02, subj05, and subj07).

...

>We used 27,750 trials from NSD for each subject (2,250 trials out of the total 30,000 trials were not publicly released by NSD). For a subset of those trials (N=2,770 trials), 982 images were viewed by all four subjects. Those trials were used as the test dataset, while the remaining trials (N=24,980) were used as the training dataset.

4 patients is small by ML standards, but with medical data you gotta make do with what you can get.

I think my second question is still valid though. How much of the image comes from the brain data vs from the StableDiffusion pretraining? Pretraining isn't inherently bad - and if your dataset is 4 patients, you're gonna need it - but it makes the results hard to interpret.

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OrangeYouGlad100 t1_jatt83m wrote

This is what they wrote:

"For a subset of those trials (N=2,770 trials), 982 images were viewed by all four subjects. Those trials were used as the test dataset, while the remaining trials (N=24,980) were used as the training dataset."

That makes it sound like 982 images were not used for training

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