Brain-CLIPLM: Semantic Compression for EEG-to-Text Decoding

Abstract:Decoding natural language from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) remains constrained by low signal-to-noise ratio and limited information bandwidth. This raises a central question: can sentence-level language be reliably recovered from such signals? Under realistic information constraints, this direct-recovery assumption may be too strong. We introduce a semantic compression hypothesis: non-invasive EEG may preserve recoverable semantic anchors rather than the full lexical--syntactic form of a sentence. From this perspective, direct sentence reconstruction is overly fine-grained relative to the recoverable information scale of EEG. To address this mismatch, we propose Brain-CLIPLM, a two-stage framework that decomposes EEG-to-text decoding into semantic-anchor recovery and anchor-guided sentence reconstruction. Stage 1 uses contrastive learning to align word-level EEG evidence with a fixed keyword vocabulary and recover ordered semantic anchors. Stage 2 uses a retrieval-grounded large language model with chain-of-thought reasoning prompts to reconstruct sentence meaning from these anchors, following a granularity matching principle that aligns decoding complexity with the recoverable neural information scale. On the combined Zurich Cognitive Language Processing (ZuCo) benchmark, Brain-CLIPLM achieves 67.6\% Top-5 and 85.0\% Top-25 sentence retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance at intermediate anchor granularity. Control analyses, including a permutation test, show that EEG-derived anchors carry sentence-specific information beyond language-model priors. These findings suggest that EEG-to-text decoding is better framed as recovering compressed semantic content before anchor-guided sentence reconstruction.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2604.16370 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2604.16370v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16370 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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