Evaluating deep transfer learning for whole-brain cognitive decoding

Research in many fields has shown that transfer learning (TL) is well-suited to improve the performance of deep learning (DL) models in datasets with small numbers of samples. This empirical success has triggered interest in the application of TL to cognitive decoding analyses with functional neuroimaging data. Here, we systematically evaluate TL for the application of DL models to the decoding of cognitive states (e.g., viewing images of faces or houses) from whole-brain functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. We first pre-train two DL architectures on a large, public fMRI dataset and subsequently evaluate their performance in an independent experimental task and a fully independent dataset. The pre-trained DL models consistently achieve higher decoding accuracies and generally require less training time and data than model variants that were not pre-trained, while also outperforming linear baseline models trained from scratch, clearly underlining the benefits of pre-training. We demonstrate that these benefits arise from the ability of the pre-trained models to reuse many of their learned features when training with new data, providing deeper insights into the mechanisms giving rise to the benefits of pre-training. Yet, we also surface nuanced challenges for whole-brain cognitive decoding with DL models when interpreting the decoding decisions of the pre-trained models, as these have learned to utilize the fMRI data in unforeseen and counterintuitive ways to identify individual cognitive states.