Autoregressive Visual Decoding from EEG Signals

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have become a popular medium for decoding visual information due to their cost-effectiveness and high temporal resolution. However, current approaches face significant challenges in bridging the modality gap between EEG and image data. These methods typically rely on complex adaptation processes involving multiple stages, making it hard to maintain consistency and manage compounding errors. Furthermore, the computational overhead imposed by large-scale diffusion models limit their practicality in real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. In this work, we present AVDE, a lightweight and efficient framework for visual decoding from EEG signals. First, we leverage LaBraM, a pre-trained EEG model, and fine-tune it via contrastive learning to align EEG and image representations. Second, we adopt an autoregressive generative framework based on a "next-scale prediction" strategy: images are encoded into multi-scale token maps using a pre-trained VQ-VAE, and a transformer is trained to autoregressively predict finer-scale tokens starting from EEG embeddings as the coarsest representation. This design enables coherent generation while preserving a direct connection between the input EEG signals and the reconstructed images. Experiments on two datasets show that AVDE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both image retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while using only 10% of the parameters. In addition, visualization of intermediate outputs shows that the generative process of AVDE reflects the hierarchical nature of human visual perception. These results highlight the potential of autoregressive models as efficient and interpretable tools for practical BCI applications.

Orthogonal Weight Modification Enhances Learning Scalability and Convergence Efficiency without Gradient Backpropagation

Recognizing the substantial computational cost of backpropagation (BP), non-BP methods have emerged as attractive alternatives for efficient learning on emerging neuromorphic systems. However, existing non-BP approaches still face critical challenges in efficiency and scalability. Inspired by neural representations and dynamic mechanisms in the brain, we propose a perturbation-based approach called LOw-rank Cluster Orthogonal (LOCO) weight modification. We find that low-rank is an inherent property of perturbation-based algorithms. Under this condition, the orthogonality constraint limits the variance of the node perturbation (NP) gradient estimates and enhances the convergence efficiency. Through extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, LOCO demonstrates the capability to locally train the deepest spiking neural networks to date (more than 10 layers), while exhibiting strong continual learning ability, improved convergence efficiency, and better task performance compared to other brain-inspired non-BP algorithms. Notably, LOCO requires only O(1) parallel time complexity for weight updates, which is significantly lower than that of BP methods. This offers a promising direction for achieving high-performance, real-time, and lifelong learning on neuromorphic systems.

GeneralVLA: Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Models with Knowledge-Guided Trajectory Planning

Large foundation models have shown strong open-world generalization to complex problems in vision and language, but similar levels of generalization have yet to be achieved in robotics. One fundamental challenge is that the models exhibit limited zero-shot capability, which hampers their ability to generalize effectively to unseen scenarios. In this work, we propose GeneralVLA (Generalizable Vision-Language-Action Models with Knowledge-Guided Trajectory Planning), a hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) model that can be more effective in utilizing the generalization of foundation models, enabling zero-shot manipulation and automatically generating data for robotics. In particular, we study a class of hierarchical VLA model where the high-level ASM (Affordance Segmentation Module) is finetuned to perceive image keypoint affordances of the scene; the mid-level 3DAgent carries out task understanding, skill knowledge, and trajectory planning to produce a 3D path indicating the desired robot end-effector trajectory. The intermediate 3D path prediction is then served as guidance to the low-level, 3D-aware control policy capable of precise manipulation. Compared to alternative approaches, our method requires no real-world robotic data collection or human demonstration, making it much more scalable to diverse tasks and viewpoints. Empirically, GeneralVLA successfully generates trajectories for 14 tasks, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as VoxPoser. The generated demonstrations can train more robust behavior cloning policies than training with human demonstrations or from data generated by VoxPoser, Scaling-up, and Code-As-Policies. We believe GeneralVLA can be the scalable method for both generating data for robotics and solving novel tasks in a zero-shot setting. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA.

A neural network for modeling human concept formation, understanding and communication

A remarkable capability of the human brain is to form more abstract conceptual representations from sensorimotor experiences and flexibly apply them independent of direct sensory inputs. However, the computational mechanism underlying this ability remains poorly understood. Here, we present a dual-module neural network framework, the CATS Net, to bridge this gap. Our model consists of a concept-abstraction module that extracts low-dimensional conceptual representations, and a task-solving module that performs visual judgement tasks under the hierarchical gating control of the formed concepts. The system develops transferable semantic structure based on concept representations that enable cross-network knowledge transfer through conceptual communication. Model-brain fitting analyses reveal that these emergent concept spaces align with both neurocognitive semantic model and brain response structures in the human ventral occipitotemporal cortex, while the gating mechanisms mirror that in the semantic control brain network. This work establishes a unified computational framework that can offer mechanistic insights for understanding human conceptual cognition and engineering artificial systems with human-like conceptual intelligence.

Flexible Tool Selection through Low-dimensional Attribute Alignment of Vision and Language

Flexible tool selection reflects a complex cognitive ability that distinguishes humans from other species, yet computational models that capture this ability remain underdeveloped. We developed a framework using low-dimensional attribute representations to bridge visual tool perception and linguistic task understanding. We constructed a comprehensive dataset (ToolNet) containing 115 common tools labeled with 13 carefully designed attributes spanning physical, functional, and psychological properties, paired with natural language scenarios describing tool usage. Visual encoders (ResNet or ViT) extract attributes from tool images while fine-tuned language models (GPT-2, LLaMA, DeepSeek) derive required attributes from task descriptions. Our approach achieves 74% accuracy in tool selection tasks-significantly outperforming direct tool matching (20%) and smaller multimodal models (21%-58%), while approaching performance of much larger models like GPT-4o (73%) with substantially fewer parameters. Ablation studies revealed that manipulation-related attributes (graspability, hand-relatedness, elongation) consistently prove most critical across modalities. This work provides a parameter-efficient, interpretable solution that mimics human-like tool cognition, advancing both cognitive science understanding and practical applications in tool selection tasks.

Visual Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Level Cognitive Flexibility in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test

Cognitive flexibility has been extensively studied in human cognition but remains relatively unexplored in the context of Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs). This study assesses the cognitive flexibility of state-of-the-art VLLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5 Pro, and Claude-3.5 Sonnet) using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), a classic measure of set-shifting ability. Our results reveal that VLLMs achieve or surpass human-level set-shifting capabilities under chain-of-thought prompting with text-based inputs. However, their abilities are highly influenced by both input modality and prompting strategy. In addition, we find that through role-playing, VLLMs can simulate various functional deficits aligned with patients having impairments in cognitive flexibility, suggesting that VLLMs may possess a cognitive architecture, at least regarding the ability of set-shifting, similar to the brain. This study reveals the fact that VLLMs have already approached the human level on a key component underlying our higher cognition, and highlights the potential to use them to emulate complex brain processes.

Prism: Unleashing GPU Sharing for Cost-Efficient Multi-LLM Serving

Serving large language models (LLMs) is expensive, especially for providers hosting many models, making cost reduction essential. The unique workload patterns of serving multiple LLMs (i.e., multi-LLM serving) create new opportunities and challenges for this task. The long-tail popularity of models and their long idle periods present opportunities to improve utilization through GPU sharing. However, existing GPU sharing systems lack the ability to adjust their resource allocation and sharing policies at runtime, making them ineffective at meeting latency service-level objectives (SLOs) under rapidly fluctuating workloads. This paper presents Prism, a multi-LLM serving system that unleashes the full potential of GPU sharing to achieve both cost efficiency and SLO attainment. At its core, Prism tackles a key limitation of existing systems$\unicode{x2014}$the lack of $\textit{cross-model memory coordination}$, which is essential for flexibly sharing GPU memory across models under dynamic workloads. Prism achieves this with two key designs. First, it supports on-demand memory allocation by dynamically mapping physical to virtual memory pages, allowing flexible memory redistribution among models that space- and time-share a GPU. Second, it improves memory efficiency through a two-level scheduling policy that dynamically adjusts sharing strategies based on models' runtime demands. Evaluations on real-world traces show that Prism achieves more than $2\times$ cost savings and $3.3\times$ SLO attainment compared to state-of-the-art systems.

ConServe: Harvesting GPUs for Low-Latency and High-Throughput Large Language Model Serving

Many applications are leveraging large language models (LLMs) for complex tasks, and they generally demand low inference latency and high serving throughput for interactive online jobs such as chatbots. However, the tight latency requirement and high load variance of applications pose challenges to serving systems in achieving high GPU utilization. Due to the high costs of scheduling and preemption, today's systems generally use separate clusters to serve online and offline inference tasks, and dedicate GPUs for online inferences to avoid interference. This approach leads to underutilized GPUs because one must reserve enough GPU resources for the peak expected load, even if the average load is low. This paper proposes to harvest stranded GPU resources for offline LLM inference tasks such as document summarization and LLM benchmarking. Unlike online inferences, these tasks usually run in a batch-processing manner with loose latency requirements, making them a good fit for stranded resources that are only available shortly. To enable safe and efficient GPU harvesting without interfering with online tasks, we built ConServe, an LLM serving system that contains (1) an execution engine that preempts running offline tasks upon the arrival of online tasks, (2) an incremental checkpointing mechanism that minimizes the amount of recomputation required by preemptions, and (3) a scheduler that adaptively batches offline tasks for higher GPU utilization. Our evaluation demonstrates that ConServe achieves strong performance isolation when co-serving online and offline tasks but at a much higher GPU utilization. When colocating practical online and offline workloads on popular models such as Llama-2-7B, ConServe achieves 2.35$\times$ higher throughput than state-of-the-art online serving systems and reduces serving latency by 84$\times$ compared to existing co-serving systems.

Learning from Pattern Completion: Self-supervised Controllable Generation

The human brain exhibits a strong ability to spontaneously associate different visual attributes of the same or similar visual scene, such as associating sketches and graffiti with real-world visual objects, usually without supervising information. In contrast, in the field of artificial intelligence, controllable generation methods like ControlNet heavily rely on annotated training datasets such as depth maps, semantic segmentation maps, and poses, which limits the method's scalability. Inspired by the neural mechanisms that may contribute to the brain's associative power, specifically the cortical modularization and hippocampal pattern completion, here we propose a self-supervised controllable generation (SCG) framework. Firstly, we introduce an equivariant constraint to promote inter-module independence and intra-module correlation in a modular autoencoder network, thereby achieving functional specialization. Subsequently, based on these specialized modules, we employ a self-supervised pattern completion approach for controllable generation training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed modular autoencoder effectively achieves functional specialization, including the modular processing of color, brightness, and edge detection, and exhibits brain-like features including orientation selectivity, color antagonism, and center-surround receptive fields. Through self-supervised training, associative generation capabilities spontaneously emerge in SCG, demonstrating excellent generalization ability to various tasks such as associative generation on painting, sketches, and ancient graffiti. Compared to the previous representative method ControlNet, our proposed approach not only demonstrates superior robustness in more challenging high-noise scenarios but also possesses more promising scalability potential due to its self-supervised manner.

Individual brain parcellation: Review of methods, validations and applications

Individual brains vary greatly in morphology, connectivity and organization. The applicability of group-level parcellations is limited by the rapid development of precision medicine today because they do not take into account the variation of parcels at the individual level. Accurate mapping of brain functional regions at the individual level is pivotal for a comprehensive understanding of the variations in brain function and behaviors, early and precise identification of brain abnormalities, as well as personalized treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders. With the development of neuroimaging and machine learning techniques, studies on individual brain parcellation are booming. In this paper, we offer an overview of recent advances in the methodologies of individual brain parcellation, including optimization- and learning-based methods. Comprehensive evaluation metrics to validate individual brain mapping have been introduced. We also review the studies of how individual brain mapping promotes neuroscience research and clinical medicine. Finally, we summarize the major challenges and important future directions of individualized brain parcellation. Collectively, we intend to offer a thorough overview of individual brain parcellation methods, validations, and applications, along with highlighting the current challenges that call for an urgent demand for integrated platforms that integrate datasets, methods, and validations.