AI "mind-reading" tool reconstructs images from brain scans with one hour of calibration

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science built an AI tool that reconstructs what a person is looking at from fMRI scans and predicts brain activity from images. Trained on data from eight people shown roughly 9,000 images each, it needs only one hour of calibration instead of the usual 40.

• The decoder recreates both image structure and content using a diffusion model
• Training used data from 8 people, each shown about 9,000 images
• About 70% of training data came from images without paired fMRI scans
• Calibration on a new person takes 1 hour of fMRI data instead of 40