Brain-to-Language Decoding: Tasks, Signals, Methods, Evaluation, Practical Use and Beyond

2026-09-23

AI Summary

本文综述了脑-语言解码技术，通过神经记录和表示学习方法，将与语言相关的神经活动转化为语言输出，旨在恢复言语丧失后的沟通并研究大脑如何表示语言。

Abstract

Brain-to-language decoding translates neural activity associated with language production, internal speech and perception into linguistic or expressive outputs. It offers a route to restoring communication after speech loss and a means of studying how the brain represents language. Advances in neural recording and representation learning have expanded the field from constrained recognition and acoustic reconstruction to text generation, streaming personalised speech and facial animation. This survey synthesises these developments across invasive and non-invasive measurements, drawing on a search without a lower year limit and source-led updates through September 2026. We connect Articulated, Inner and Perceived tasks to the neural populations they engage, the representations available to decoders and the outputs those representations can support. We examine model development, public resources and the evolution of evaluation, and compare published performance and communication costs within their reported protocols. The synthesis identifies complementary routes to progress: phonetic, acoustic and semantic targets preserve different aspects of a message; shared representations support reuse across recording conditions and tasks; and online communication increasingly depends on calibration, feedback and user control alongside decoding accuracy. Shared benchmarks enable algorithmic comparisons, while longitudinal studies reveal the demands of sustained use. We discuss these developments and their remaining limitations, then outline a prospective five-level trajectory from commands and language to meaning, scenarios and bidirectional cognitive exchange

Problem

• brain-to-language decoding
• neural activity
• language production
• communication restoration
• representation learning

Innovation

• brain-to-language decoding
• representation learning
• personalised speech
• facial animation
• shared representations