ProtoEEG: Structured Prototype Alignment for EEG Visual Decoding

arXiv:2610.33065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: EEG visual decoding remains difficult because scalp recordings are noisy, spatially coarse, and variable across trials and subjects. Most systems align each trial with a dense image embedding, although that embedding mixes semantic content with instance-specific texture, pose, and background. This target can demand details absent from EEG and provides no explicit account of the visual factors supporting a prediction. We propose \textbf{ProtoEEG}, a prototype-mediated framework that reformulates EEG--image alignment as soft composition over a shared learnable visual codebook. A trainable EEG encoder and a frozen visual teacher produce assignment distributions over the same $K=64$ prototypes. Their weighted reconstructions form a structured rep