Multi-Level Alignment Framework for Long-Term Olfactory Neural Decoding
Abstract
Realizing stable neural decoding over extended periods remains a significant challenge, primarily because invariant task-related neural dynamics are inextricably entangled with inherent signal non-stationarity and the physical drift of electrode-neuron interfaces. This work introduces LNDN (Long-term Neural Decoding Network), a hierarchical framework designed to decouple category-specific neural dynamic manifolds from representational drift, sustaining decoding precision without periodic recalibration. The proposed architecture addresses representational drift through an integrated tri-level alignment strategy. At the physical feature level, a decoupled representation and dynamic gating module isolates the physical identity of neurons from their transient states, adaptively filtering stochastic neural noise. This is further strengthened at the decision level by a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which employs a parallel soft-voting mechanism to suppress high variance induced by local representational distortions. Finally, at the manifold level, Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) and latent contrastive learning, combined with second-order correlation alignment, explicitly anchor the geometric consistency of the low-dimensional neural manifold over a period of months. Systematic evaluations on a longitudinal olfactory dataset, involving 9 mice performing a four-odor decoding task, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. When trained exclusively on data from the initial four weeks, LNDN maintains an average accuracy of 83.67\% on completely unseen tests spanning the subsequent eight weeks, significantly outperforming mainstream domain adaptation and advanced neural decoding baselines. This framework offers a scalable, "set-and-forget" solution for robust, long-term invasive brain-computer interface applications.