DECODE: Dual-Enhanced Conditioned Diffusion for EEG Forecasting
Authors: Mehran Shabanpour, Sadaf Khademi, Konstantinos N Plataniotis, Arash Mohammadi
Organizations: Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE), Concordia University, Canada. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Architecture of the proposed dual-conditioned diffusion model for event-specific EEG forecasting. The DECODE framework integrates semantic guidance from natural language event descriptions (top path) with history-based temporal conditioning (bottom path) through a hierarchical diffusion process. Text descriptions are encoded via frozen BERT-large and projected to a shared embedding space, while historical EEG signals undergo forward diffusion before processing through encoder-decoder transformers with interpretable decomposition.
Figure 2: Representative EEG forecasting results for electrodes P7 and Pz, with historical signal (blue) providing temporal context up to timestep 1000 and the model generating probabilistic forecasts (orange) compared to ground truth (purple). The topographic map shows grand-average voltage distribution (0-500 ms post-stimulus) with red indicating positive and blue indicating negative potentials.
Figure 3: Mean Absolute Error (MAE) over time across the 75-timestep prediction horizon.
Measure
Event
Value
p
d
ERP Modulation ( μ V)
Frontal (Fz)
Brake
+1.06
< .001
–
Turn
+0.81
.015
–
Lane Change
+0.70
.005
–
Parietal (Pz)
Brake
-1.42
< .001
–
Event-Related Synchronization (%)
Table 1: Statistical analysis of neural response characteristics across driving events.
Event identification in continuous neural recordings is a critical task in neuroscience. Decoding in EEG is dominated by classifying windows aligned to known event onsets. However, while available in controlled experiments, such onsets are absent in continuous real-world monitoring. Here, we introduce DANCE, a deep learning pipeline that frames neural decoding as a set-prediction problem and jointly detects and classifies events directly from raw, unaligned signals. Evaluated separately on ten datasets curated from the literature with a wide variety of event types (ranging from milliseconds to minutes in duration), our model outperforms existing methods on a broad range of cognitive, clinical and BCI tasks. This single architecture establishes a new state of the art in the competitive task of seizure monitoring and matches the accuracy of onset-informed models for BCI tasks. Overall, our method marks a step towards end-to-end asynchronous neural decoding models
Jarod Lévy, Hubert Banville, Jérémy Rapin +3
1Meta AI · 2Inria, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau, France
The development of generalizable electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models is essential for robust brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and objective neural biomarkers in mental health. Conventional approaches have been hindered by poor cross-subject and cross-task generalization, owing to high inter-subject variability and non-stationary neural signals. We address this challenge with a zero-shot cross-subject decoding framework on the large-scale Healthy Brain Network dataset, benchmarking a convolutional neural network baseline, a hybrid LSTM, and a Transformer-based foundation model. To adapt the Transformer for regression while averting catastrophic forgetting, we propose a novel progressive unfreezing strategy. The baseline yielded an nRMSE of 0.9991, whereas our fine-tuned Transformer achieved 0.9799 on unseen subjects. This work advances scalable, calibration-free EEG decoding for computational psychiatry and behavioral prediction.
Baimam Boukar Jean Jacques, Brandone Fonya, Nchofon Tagha Ghogomu +2
Decoding natural language from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) remains constrained by low signal-to-noise ratio and limited information bandwidth. This raises a central question: can sentence-level language be reliably recovered from such signals? Under realistic information constraints, this direct-recovery assumption may be too strong. We introduce a semantic compression hypothesis: non-invasive EEG may preserve recoverable semantic anchors rather than the full lexical--syntactic form of a sentence. From this perspective, direct sentence reconstruction is overly fine-grained relative to the recoverable information scale of EEG. To address this mismatch, we propose Brain-CLIPLM, a two-stage framework that decomposes EEG-to-text decoding into semantic-anchor recovery and anchor-guided sentence reconstruction. Stage 1 uses contrastive learning to align word-level EEG evidence with a fixed keyword vocabulary and recover ordered semantic anchors. Stage 2 uses a retrieval-grounded large language model with chain-of-thought reasoning prompts to reconstruct sentence meaning from these anchors, following a granularity matching principle that aligns decoding complexity with the recoverable neural information scale. On the combined Zurich Cognitive Language Processing (ZuCo) benchmark, Brain-CLIPLM achieves 67.6% Top-5 and 85.0% Top-25 sentence retrieval accuracy, with the strongest performance at intermediate anchor granularity. Control analyses show that EEG-derived anchors carry sentence-specific information beyond language-model priors. Within the constrained ZuCo sentence pool and fixed keyword-vocabulary settings, these findings suggest that EEG-to-text decoding is better framed as recovering compressed semantic content before anchor-guided sentence reconstruction.
Xiaoli Yang, Huiyuan Tian, Yurui Li +3
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · State Key Lab of Brain-Machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China