Yuki Kamitani

@ykamit.bsky.social

Yukiyasu Kamitani | 神谷之康 Neuroscientist and brain decoder http://kamitani-lab.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp http://youtube.com/@ATRDNI/videos https://twitter.com/ykamit

New preprint. Taking spurious reconstruction as our entry point, and using the framework of C (looking convincing) and T (the target being achieved) from Ken Shirakawa's doctoral thesis, we give a formal account of how phantom evidence arises in the age of generative AI.  arxiv.org/abs/2607.25991

Phantom Evidence: How and Why Generative AI Manufactures False Positives in Science

Four centuries ago Francis Bacon warned against the anticipations of nature, hasty generalization that wins assent on a few facts, and set against it the table of absence: checking that a property fai...

arxiv.org

“If pizza was never shown during training, brain decoding cannot reconstruct pizza.” This is a misconception. Since Miyawaki et al. (2008), reconstructing unseen stimuli has been a core requirement of reconstruction, distinct from classification or retrieval.

New preprint from our lab led by Onoo-san. We propose readout representation, defining neural codes by what can be recovered, not what caused them. Inputs remain recoverable from distant features, revealing expansive, redundant codes that align neural activation with meaning arxiv.org/abs/2510.12228

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New preprint from our lab, led by Otsuka-san. In brain–AI alignment, linear transformations are common—but when features ≫ samples, outputs collapse onto the training set, breaking zero-shot predictions. We mathematically show how data and model sparsity can help avoid this. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15832

Overcoming Output Dimension Collapse: How Sparsity Enables Zero-shot Brain-to-Image Reconstruction at Small Data Scales

Advances in brain-to-image reconstruction are enabling us to externalize the subjective visual experiences encoded in the brain as images. Achieving such reconstruction with limited training data requ...

arxiv.org

Our article is out in Annual Review of Vision Science: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation” We trace the path from early brain decoding to modern NeuroAI, highlight progress & pitfalls, and discuss future directions www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation | Annual Reviews

Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. T...

annualreviews.org

I promised to write about my thoughts on the status of the field of neuroAI, some of the big challenges we are facing, and the approaches we are taking to address them. This is super selective on the topic of finding a good model but in my view it affects the field as a whole. Here we go. 🧵

New preprint, led by Ken Shirakawa. Using inappropriate generative AI methods and naturalistic data, seemingly realistic but spurious visual image reconstruction can be generated from brain data (even from random data). We describe it and formulate how it occurs arxiv.org/abs/2405.10078

Spurious reconstruction from brain activity

Advances in brain decoding, particularly visual image reconstruction, have sparked discussions about the societal implications and ethical considerations of neurotechnology. As these methods aim...

arxiv.org

While investigating the issues of questionable brain decoding and reconstruction (osf.io/nmfc5/#!), Misato Tanaka from my lab found that the seminal paper by Nishimoto, Naselaris, Benjamini, Yu, & Gallant (2011) appears to use highly similar stimuli across both training and test sets. ...

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