Ziyi Ye
2026
Language Reconstruction with Brain Predictive Coding from fMRI Data
Congchi Yin | Ziyi Ye | Piji Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Congchi Yin | Ziyi Ye | Piji Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Many recent studies have shown that the perception of speech can be decoded from brain signals and subsequently reconstructed as continuous language. However, there is a lack of neurological basis for how the semantic information embedded within brain signals can be used more effectively to guide language reconstruction. Predictive coding theory suggests the human brain naturally engages in continuously predicting future words that span multiple timescales. This implies that the decoding of brain signals could potentially be associated with a predictable future. To explore the predictive coding theory within the context of language reconstruction, this paper proposes PredFT (FMRI-to-Text decoding with Predictive coding). PredFT consists of a main network and a side network. The side network obtains brain predictive representation from related regions of interest (ROIs) with a self-attention module. The representation is then fused into the main network for continuous language decoding. Experiments on two naturalistic language comprehension fMRI datasets show that PredFT outperforms current decoding models on several evaluation metrics.
2025
SimVBG: Simulating Individual Values by Backstory Generation
Bangde Du | Ziyi Ye | Zhijing Wu | Monika A. Jankowska | Shuqi Zhu | Qingyao Ai | Yujia Zhou | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bangde Du | Ziyi Ye | Zhijing Wu | Monika A. Jankowska | Shuqi Zhu | Qingyao Ai | Yujia Zhou | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly strong human-like capabilities, the need to align them with human values has become significant. Recent advanced techniques, such as prompt learning and reinforcement learning, are being employed to bring LLMs closer to aligning with human values. While these techniques address broad ethical and helpfulness concerns, they rarely consider simulating individualized human values. To bridge this gap, we propose SimVBG, a framework that simulates individual values based on individual backstories that reflect their past experience and demographic information. SimVBG transforms structured data on an individual to a backstory and utilizes a multi-module architecture inspired by the Cognitive–Affective Personality System to simulate individual value based on the backstories. We test SimVBG on a self-constructed benchmark derived from the World Values Survey and show that SimVBG improves top-1 accuracy by more than 10% over the retrieval-augmented generation method. Further analysis shows that performance increases as additional interaction user history becomes available, indicating that the model can refine its persona over time. Code, dataset, and complete experimental results are available at https://github.com/bangdedadi/SimVBG.