Organizations: Information Science and Techinology, Hokkaido University, Japan · SANKEN, The University of Osaka, Japan · Great Bay University, China · Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
Modeling neural population dynamics is crucial for foundational neuroscientific research and various clinical applications. Conventional latent variable methods typically model continuous brain dynamics through discretizing time with recurrent architecture, which necessarily results in compounded cumulative prediction errors and failure of capturing instantaneous, nonlinear characteristics of EEGs. We propose ODEBRAIN, a Neural ODE latent dynamic forecasting framework to overcome these challenges by integrating spatio-temporal-frequency features into spectral graph nodes, followed by a Neural ODE modeling the continuous latent dynamics. Our design ensures that latent representations can capture stochastic variations of complex brain states at any given time point. Extensive experiments verify that ODEBRAIN can improve significantly over existing methods in forecasting EEG dynamics with enhanced robustness and generalization capabilities.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (Left) Continuous EEG real-time neuronal activity recordings. (Mid) Recurrent-based methods employ discrete modeling. (Right) ODE provides a continuous representation for forecasting neuronal population dynamics.
Figure 2: Continuous neural dynamics modeling via ODEBRAIN with graph forecasting. In stage 1, multi-channel EEG signals are encoded into spectral graph snapshots and fused with raw features to construct noise-robust initial states for ODE integration, predicting future spectral graphs. In stage 2, ODEBRAIN propagates latent states through time, generating dynamic field f that captures continuous trajectories. Finally, future graph node embeddings are obtained by zT and compared with the ground-truth graph nodes.
Figure 3: The full structure of the temporal-spatial ODE solving. (a)RK-4 step numerical solver. (b) Procedure of temporal-spatial fθ .
Model
Method
T(s)
AUROC
F1
Discrete & Continuous
BIOT
12
0.772 ± 0.006
0.294 ± 0.006
60
0.642 ± 0.009
0.256 ± 0.003
DCRNN
12
0.816 ± 0.002
0.416 ± 0.009
60
0.802 ± 0.003
0.413 ± 0.005
latent-ODE
12
0.791 ± 0.004
0.385 ± 0.005
60
0.745 ± 0.036
0.331 ± 0.031
Table 1: Results (AUROC↑, F1↑) on TUSZ (12s and 60s seizure detection) against discrete and continuous baselines, with options on the gate and stochastic regularization. (-: w/o, +Random: gate with random coefficients for stochastic regularization.) Bold = best.
Method
TUSZ
TUAB
Acc
F1
AUROC
Acc
F1
AUROC
CNN-LSTM
0.735±3
0.347±12
0.757±3
0.741±2
0.736±7
0.813±3
BIOT
0.702±3
0.294±6
0.772±6
0.717±2
0.713±4
0.788±2
EvolveGCN
0.769±2
0.385±5
0.791±4
0.708±3
0.707±2
0.777±3
DCRNN
0.816±2
0.416±9
0.825±2
0.768±4
0.769±2
0.848±2
latent-ODE
0.827±4
0.470±5
0.849±4
0.749±3
0.745±2
0.829±4
Table 2: Main results on TUSZ (12s seizure detection) and TUAB . Bold and underline indicate best and second-best results. ⋆ : The performance depends on the discrete multi-steps forecasting. † : The performance depends on the continuous multi-steps forecasting. ‡ : The performance depends on the continuous single-step forecasting.
Figure 4: Visualization results between the multichannel EEG signal (upper and lower) and its latent dynamic field fθ (middle) obtained by ODEBRAIN . Local minima appearing in (a) and (c) indicate rapid changes, corresponding to seizure states.
Figure 5: Visualizing learned dynamic fields between our spatial-temporal(ST)-ODE solver and the frequency (F)-ODE solver.
Figure 6: Results on (a) graph similarity and (b) functional connections.
Figure 7: Summary of ablation study. (a) State initialization. We compare spatial-only, mixed, and temporal–spatial initialization and summarized results in F1, Recall and AUROC. Temporal–Spatial achieves the best F1 (0.502) with a competitive recall. (b) Loss function. Replacing our structural forecasting loss with reconstruction-only or raw-signal forecasting degrades performance on AUROC. (c) Forecast horizon. AUROC decreases as the horizon grows ( 1 s →3 s →11 s), and Temporal–Spatial remains the best across all horizons over others.
Table 10
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 8: Visualization results between the multichannel EEG signal (upper) and its latent dynamic field fθ (lower) in our temporal-spatial neural ODE.
Figure 9: Comparison of the predicted graph output between our continuous predictor and discrete predictor.
Method
TUSZ
TUAB
Acc
F1
AUROC
Acc
F1
AUROC
Max pooling
0.877±0.004
0.496±0.017
0.881±0.006
0.778±0.003
0.774±0.005
0.857±0.005
Mean pooling
0.842±2
0.385±5
0.827±3
0.748±2
0.635±2
0.827±4
Sum pooling
0.851±2
0.466±5
0.867±4
0.753±3
0.755±2
0.831±4
Appendix
Table 5: Ablation of pooling options over ODE-trajectory on TUSZ (12s seizure detection) and TUAB . Bold indicates best result.
ODE
Method
T(Sec.)
AUROC
F1
Temporal-spatial
EvolveGCN
12
0.791 ± 0.003
0.401 ± 0.002
60
0.729 ± 0.002
0.378 ± 0.003
DCRNN
12
0.823 ± 0.005
0.433 ± 0.005
60
0.818 ± 0.004
0.417 ± 0.007
GRU-GCN
12
0.881 ± 0.006
0.496 ± 0.017
60
0.828 ± 0.003
0.430 ± 0.021
Appendix
Table 6: Ablation of GNN options on TUSZ (12s and 60s seizure detection) (AUROC↑, F1↑) Bold = best.
MV
Method
Sim.
AUROC
F1
0%
latent-ODE
0.53
0.791 ± 0.003
0.401 ± 0.002
ODEBRAIN
0.63
0.881 ± 0.006
0.496 ± 0.017
30%
latent-ODE
0.41
0.721 ± 0.004
0.377 ± 0.003
ODEBRAIN
0.55
0.845 ± 0.002
0.464 ± 0.007
Appendix
Table 7: Ablation of missing value (MV) on TUSZ (12s seizure detection) with AUROC↑, F1↑, and predicted missing graph structural similarity (Sim.)↑ (Bold = best).
Top- τ
AUROC
Recall
F1
2
0.867 ± 0.003
0.575 ± 0.003
0.484 ± 0.009
3
0.881 ± 0.006
0.605 ± 0.003
0.496 ± 0.017
7
0.870 ± 0.004
0.602 ± 0.004
0.488 ± 0.013
9
0.868 ± 0.004
0.589 ± 0.004
0.487 ± 0.011
11
0.866 ± 0.004
0.571 ± 0.002
0.491 ± 0.003
13
0.865 ± 0.003
0.562 ± 0.004
0.474 ± 0.003
Appendix
Table 8: Ablation on TUSZ dataset for 12s seizure detection with different top- τ options. Bold and underline indicate best and second-best results.
Brain activity unfolds as coordinated patterns across regions over time, and modeling these dynamics is a central goal in computational neuroscience. Because activity is distributed over connected brain regions, it is naturally represented on a graph whose nodes are brain regions or recording electrodes and whose edges capture relationships between these nodes, with message-passing modeling regional communication. However, standard message-passing networks place every node in a single shared feature space and typically aggregate messages from neighbors by scalar summation, which does not align with neurobiological evidence of brain communication. In order to model the heterogeneous nature of the brain, we introduce BrainDyn, a graph ordinary differential equation (ODE) network built on a cellular sheaf with dynamic restriction maps, recomputed from the forecasting context window rather than fixed once, mediating region-to-region communication through learned linear transformations that drive the time evolution of neural activity. We evaluate BrainDyn on resting-state fMRI, EEG, and simulated activity from the NEST simulator. Across these modalities, we test multi-region forecasting and autoregressive generation of brain transients, and, using NEST, prediction of altered transients following controlled perturbations. BrainDyn outperforms competing models across modalities, while analysis of the learned features shows that they are expressive, interpretable, and biologically aligned.
Siddharth Viswanath, Panayiotis Ketonis, Cassidy All +10
Yale University · Boise State University · University of Wisconsin–Madison
Forecasting Electroncephalography (EEG) signals during cognitive events remains a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), as existing methods struggle to capture both the stochastic nature of neural dynamics and the semantic context of behavioral tasks. We present the Dual-Enhanced COnditioned Diffusion (DECODE) for EEG, a novel framework that unifies semantic guidance from natural language descriptions with temporal dynamics from historical signals to generate event-specific neural responses. DECODE leverages pre-trained language models to condition the diffusion process on rich textual descriptions of cognitive events, while maintaining temporal coherence through history-based Langevin dynamics. Evaluated on a real-world driving task dataset with five distinct behaviors, DECODE achieves sub-microvolt prediction accuracy (MAE = 0.626 microvolt) over 75 timestep horizons while maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Our framework demonstrates that natural language can effectively bridge high-level cognitive descriptions and low-level neural dynamics, opening new possibilities for zero-shot generalization to novel behaviors and interpretable BCIs. By generating physiologically plausible, event-specific EEG trajectories conditioned on semantic descriptions, DECODE establishes a new paradigm for understanding and predicting context-dependent neural activity.
Mehran Shabanpour, Sadaf Khademi, Konstantinos N Plataniotis +1
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE), Concordia University, Canada. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
Continuous electroencephalography (EEG) emotion prediction aims to model the temporal evolution of human emotional states from EEG signals. Unlike conventional discrete emotion recognition, continuous prediction requires capturing long-range temporal dependencies and coherent emotional dynamics. However, existing methods mainly rely on point-wise regression and directly model noisy high-dimensional EEG features, limiting their ability to characterize continuous emotional evolution.To address these challenges, we propose EEGDancer, a dynamic emotional latent space learning framework for continuous EEG emotion prediction. The framework integrates vector-quantized representation learning, masked temporal modeling, and reinforcement learning-based trajectory optimization into a unified architecture.Specifically, a causal spatiotemporal Vector-Quantization Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) is designed to learn structured emotional prototypes and construct a discrete-continuous emotional latent space from EEG signals. Based on the learned latent representations, a Transformer-based masked dynamic modeling strategy captures long-range emotional dependencies and temporal evolution patterns. Furthermore, continuous emotion prediction is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem, and a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework is introduced to optimize emotional prediction trajectories at the sequence level instead of frame-wise local fitting.Extensive experiments on the SEED, SEED-IV, and Long-Term Naturalistic Emotion datasets demonstrate that EEGDancer consistently outperforms existing machine learning and deep learning methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed latent space and reinforcement learning-based trajectory optimization for modeling continuous EEG emotional dynamics.
Zhihao Zhou, Weishan Ye, Li Zhang +2
The School of Biomedical Engineering, Medical School, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · The Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound2026 Imaging, Shenzhen, China