This paper introduces NeuGPT, a groundbreaking multi-modal language generation model designed to harmonize the fragmented landscape of neural recording research. Traditionally, studies in the field have been compartmentalized by signal type, with EEG, MEG, ECoG, SEEG, fMRI, and fNIRS data being analyzed in isolation. Recognizing the untapped potential for cross-pollination and the adaptability of neural signals across varying experimental conditions, we set out to develop a unified model capable of interfacing with multiple modalities. Drawing inspiration from the success of pre-trained large models in NLP, computer vision, and speech processing, NeuGPT is architected to process a diverse array of neural recordings and interact with speech and text data. Our model mainly focus on brain-to-text decoding, improving SOTA from 6.94 to 12.92 on BLEU-1 and 6.93 to 13.06 on ROUGE-1F. It can also simulate brain signals, thereby serving as a novel neural interface. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/NeuSpeech/NeuGPT}{NeuSpeech/NeuGPT (https://github.com/NeuSpeech/NeuGPT) .}

This work critically analyzes existing models for open-vocabulary EEG-to-Text translation. We identify a crucial limitation: previous studies often employed implicit teacher-forcing during evaluation, artificially inflating performance metrics. Additionally, they lacked a critical benchmark - comparing model performance on pure noise inputs. We propose a methodology to differentiate between models that truly learn from EEG signals and those that simply memorize training data. Our analysis reveals that model performance on noise data can be comparable to that on EEG data. These findings highlight the need for stricter evaluation practices in EEG-to-Text research, emphasizing transparent reporting and rigorous benchmarking with noise inputs. This approach will lead to more reliable assessments of model capabilities and pave the way for robust EEG-to-Text communication systems.

Deciphering language from brain activity is a crucial task in brain-computer interface (BCI) research. Non-invasive cerebral signaling techniques including electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) are becoming increasingly popular due to their safety and practicality, avoiding invasive electrode implantation. However, current works under-investigated three points: 1) a predominant focus on EEG with limited exploration of MEG, which provides superior signal quality; 2) poor performance on unseen text, indicating the need for models that can better generalize to diverse linguistic contexts; 3) insufficient integration of information from other modalities, which could potentially constrain our capacity to comprehensively understand the intricate dynamics of brain activity. This study presents a novel approach for translating MEG signals into text using a speech-decoding framework with multiple alignments. Our method is the first to introduce an end-to-end multi-alignment framework for totally unseen text generation directly from MEG signals. We achieve an impressive BLEU-1 score on the $\textit{GWilliams}$ dataset, significantly outperforming the baseline from 5.49 to 10.44 on the BLEU-1 metric. This improvement demonstrates the advancement of our model towards real-world applications and underscores its potential in advancing BCI research. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/NeuSpeech/MAD-MEG2text}{https://github.com/NeuSpeech/MAD-MEG2text}$.

Decoding language from brain dynamics is an important open direction in the realm of brain-computer interface (BCI), especially considering the rapid growth of large language models. Compared to invasive-based signals which require electrode implantation surgery, non-invasive neural signals (e.g. EEG, MEG) have attracted increasing attention considering their safety and generality. However, the exploration is not adequate in three aspects: 1) previous methods mainly focus on EEG but none of the previous works address this problem on MEG with better signal quality; 2) prior works have predominantly used $``teacher-forcing"$ during generative decoding, which is impractical; 3) prior works are mostly $``BART-based"$ not fully auto-regressive, which performs better in other sequence tasks. In this paper, we explore the brain-to-text translation of MEG signals in a speech-decoding formation. Here we are the first to investigate a cross-attention-based ``whisper" model for generating text directly from MEG signals without teacher forcing. Our model achieves impressive BLEU-1 scores of 60.30 and 52.89 without pretraining $\&$ teacher-forcing on two major datasets ($\textit{GWilliams}$ and $\textit{Schoffelen}$). This paper conducts a comprehensive review to understand how speech decoding formation performs on the neural decoding tasks, including pretraining initialization, training $\&$ evaluation set splitting, augmentation, and scaling law. Code is available at https://github.com/NeuSpeech/NeuSpeech1$.