Implicit Behavioral Decoding from Next-Step Spike Forecasts at Population Scale

Decoding continuous motor trajectories from neural activity is essential for developing practical brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, current neural decoders are constrained by the limited scale and heterogeneity of neural recordings. In contrast, behavioral data can be collected more readily and at substantially larger scale from humans, animals, simulations, and robotic systems. Here, we introduce NeuroPB, a framework that scales neural decoding by transferring knowledge from pretrained behavioral representations. NeuroPB first pretrains a motor encoder on large-scale motor behavior data and then aligns neural activity with the resulting behavioral representation space using a limited set of paired neural-behavioral recordings. A neural encoder and lightweight motor decoder are subsequently optimized to reconstruct continuous movement from the aligned neural representations. Across multiple macaque motor datasets, behavioral pretraining improves trajectory decoding, including an 11% $R^2$ increase on center-out and 8% on random-target compared with training the motor encoder from scratch. Notably, pretraining on robotic trajectories achieves performance comparable to pretraining on macaque trajectories, demonstrating that transferable kinematic structure is shared across biological and artificial models. Moreover, decoding performance improves as the scale and diversity of robotic pretraining data increase, when the amount of neural data is fixed. Pretraining also enhances generalization across recording sessions, subjects, and motor tasks, with only 10% calibration needed to match training from scratch. Overall, these results establish behavioral pretraining as a scalable source for neural decoding and provide a promising route toward high-performance and calibration-efficient BCIs under limited neural data.

Spike activity has been the dominant neural signal for behavior decoding due to its high spatial and temporal resolution. However, as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) move toward high channel counts and wireless operation, the high sampling frequency of spike signals becomes a bottleneck due to high power and bandwidth requirements. Local field potentials (LFPs) represent a different spatial-temporal scale of brain activity compared to spikes, offering key advantages including improved long-term stability, reduced energy consumption, and lower bandwidth requirement. Despite these benefits, LFP-based decoding models typically show reduced accuracy and often rely on non-causal architectures that are unsuitable for real-time deployment. To address these challenges, we propose REALM: a retrospective distillation framework that enables causal LFP decoding. Inspired by offline-to-online distillation strategies in speech recognition, REALM transfers representational knowledge from a pretrained multi-session bidirectional LFP model to a causal version for real-time deployment. We first pretrain a bidirectional Mamba-2 teacher model using a masked autoencoding objective. We then distill this teacher model into a compact student model via a combined objective of representation alignment and task supervision. REALM consistently outperforms both causal and non-causal LFP-based SOTA methods for behavior decoding. Notably, our REALM improves decoding performance while achieving a $2\times$ reduction in parameter count and a $10\times$ reduction in training time. These results demonstrate that retrospective distillation effectively bridges the gap between offline and real-time neural decoding. REALM shows that LFP-only models can achieve competitive decoding performance without reliance on spike signals, offering a practical and scalable alternative for next-generation wireless implantable BCIs.

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces suffer from day-to-day neural signal shifts that degrade pretrained decoders. Existing unsupervised adaptation methods rely on deep recurrent or adversarial architectures that are too computationally expensive for implantable hardware. We propose Membrane Potential Alignment (MPA), a test-time adaptation method for spiking neural networks that realigns a pretrained decoder to shifted recordings by only matching membrane potential distributions via KL divergence. By restricting updates to low-rank (LoRA) weights, MPA adapts fewer than 9% of parameters. On a non-human primate reaching task spanning over one month, MPA achieves performance competitive with the state-of-the-art NoMAD method, while using a simpler architecture and finer temporal resolution (4 ms vs. 20 ms). These results show that efficient SNN-based test-time adaptation is a practical path toward long-term, recalibration-free brain-computer interfaces.