A Language-Guided Multimodal Foundation Model for Zero-Shot and Multi-Task Brain Signal Analysis

Brain signal analysis is essential for both neuroscience research and clinical diagnostics, yet current approaches face critical limitations. End-to-end models require task-specific retraining and exhibit limited generalization, while pre-trained models lack semantic depth and still depend on extensive fine-tuning. Meanwhile, general-purpose multimodal foundation models, though powerful in other domains, struggle to interpret brain signals due to representational misalignment and lack of domain knowledge. This study introduces a multimodal foundation model for zero-shot and multi-task brain signal analysis (METIS) through a unified language-signal alignment framework. METIS is pretrained on the largest and most diverse brain-signal corpus to date, comprising over 70,000 h of recordings from more than 11,000 subjects across 20 datasets. In a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation across 12 datasets, METIS outperformed the leading generalist model by over 20.9% in average accuracy. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, METIS's performance matches or exceeds that of supervised, task-specific models. Furthermore, METIS demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and strong generalization, achieving an average AUROC advantage of over 16.0% in few-shot settings and 15.9% in cross-dataset transfer. This work establishes a new paradigm for general-purpose brain signal analysis, paving the way for next-generation neurotechnology.