AVID: A 5T fMRI Dataset for Benchmarking Auditory-induced Visual Mental Imagery Decoding

Shiqi Shen, Shurui Li, Xilin Zhang, Yuanning Li

Visual mental imagery (VMI) decoding uses brain activity to reconstruct internally generated visual scenes, providing a potential pathway for externalizing internal experiences and developing neuroprosthetic communication interfaces. However, progress is limited by the lack of dedicated, training-scale VMI datasets. Current VMI paradigms often rely on visual prompts or short-term memory images, introducing visual and mnemonic confounds that make it difficult to disentangle neural activity associated with endogenous image construction from signals driven by prior or concurrent visual input. Furthermore, existing VMI datasets offer limited descriptive control over individual visual attributes, making it difficult to systematically assess fine grained visual details. To address these gaps, we introduce AVID, the first dedicated training-scale 5.0 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) resource for auditory-induced VMI decoding. AVID comprises approximately 67 hours of dense recordings from nine participants. The dataset is structured into two complementary splits: a scene-level complex split using naturalistic Mandarin descriptions and a controlled simple split with…