← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.15204 · v1
Alignment De-Identifies Without Aligning: A Congruence-Invariant Relational Gap in Cross-Subject Neural Representations
首次提交 2026-11-11 16:59
版本更新 2026-11-11 16:59
雷达观测 2026-11-13 11:11
摘要
In brain-computer interfaces, inter-subject variability remains a major challenge that limits decoding performance across users. Subject-wise alignment is widely used to improve cross-subject transfer of neural decoders, yet it is typically evaluated only through decoding accuracy, which cannot determine whether aligned representations share greater task-related structure. We therefore distinguish two questions that accuracy conflates: whether alignment removes subject-specific information and whether it makes the relational organization of task conditions more similar across individuals. Using three motor imagery-EEG cohorts, trials are represented as covariance matrices and aligned by recentering each subject's mean covariance to a common reference. Subject-specific information is quantified with a subject-identification probe, whereas relational structure is assessed using representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) computed from condition means with the affine-invariant Riemannian distance. We show that recentering leaves this distance, and therefore the resulting RDMs, unchanged. Consistent with this result, recentering reduces subject identification accuracy from 0.96 to chance level across all cohorts, while altering RDMs only at numerical precision. Cross-subject agreement in relational structure is significantly above zero but below the estimator's lower noise ceiling. Introducing an explicit similarity regularizer during training also fails to increase held-out agreement: the apparent reduction in between-subject differences is explained by a decline in the reliability ceiling rather than improved alignment. These findings show that eliminating subject identity is not equivalent to aligning relational geometry. More broadly, alignment claims must be interpreted relative to the invariances of both the distance and the statistic used to evaluate them.
作者备注：23 pages (12 pages main text and references, 11 pages appendix), 2 figures. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026, NeurReps Workshop
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v1 · 2026-11-11 16:59 · 最新观测版本
Alignment De-Identifies Without Aligning: A Congruence-Invariant Relational Gap in Cross-Subject Neural Representations
In brain-computer interfaces, inter-subject variability remains a major challenge that limits decoding performance across users. Subject-wise alignment is widely used to improve cross-subject transfer of neural decoders, yet it is typically evaluated only through decoding accuracy, which cannot determine whether aligned representations share greater task-related structure. We therefore distinguish two questions that accuracy conflates: whether alignment removes subject-specific information and whether it makes the relational organization of task conditions more similar across individuals. Using three motor imagery-EEG cohorts, trials are represented as covariance matrices and aligned by recentering each subject's mean covariance to a common reference. Subject-specific information is quantified with a subject-identification probe, whereas relational structure is assessed using representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) computed from condition means with the affine-invariant Riemannian distance. We show that recentering leaves this distance, and therefore the resulting RDMs, unchanged. Consistent with this result, recentering reduces subject identification accuracy from 0.96 to chance level across all cohorts, while altering RDMs only at numerical precision. Cross-subject agreement in relational structure is significantly above zero but below the estimator's lower noise ceiling. Introducing an explicit similarity regularizer during training also fails to increase held-out agreement: the apparent reduction in between-subject differences is explained by a decline in the reliability ceiling rather than improved alignment. These findings show that eliminating subject identity is not equivalent to aligning relational geometry. More broadly, alignment claims must be interpreted relative to the invariances of both the distance and the statistic used to evaluate them.
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