FlatClip: Reusing Image Foundation Models for fMRI Representation Learning via Cortical Flatmaps
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Can the spatial organization of cortical activity help transfer frozen image representations to fMRI prediction? We introduce FlatClip, which renders cortical activity as anatomy-linked flatmaps and extracts features with a frozen SigLIP2 encoder. Only a lightweight downstream probe is trained, without fMRI-specific encoder pretraining or fine-tuning. Across four resting-state benchmarks, FlatClip outperforms the evaluated ROI-level baselines on HCP and ADNI, but is weaker on PPMI and below the strongest voxel-level models overall. On NSD visual-fMRI decoding, restricting inputs to visual or NSD-provided task-active cortex improves recognition over whole-cortex inputs. Spatial perturbations reduce performance with both retrained and fixed readouts, and anatomy-linked arrangements outperform cortical-pixel permutations across three colormaps. Together, these results demonstrate a practical route for reusing image-pretrained features in fMRI and highlight cortical arrangement and input-region selection as important design choices. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlatClip.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214657206