Brain-Computer Interfaces
Also known as BCI
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11 papers in the last four weeks, up 175% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 85
The development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on electroencephalograms (EEGs) has advanced significantly mainly to machine learning. Although the majority of earlier research has been on increasing classification accuracy, relatively little focus has been placed on security and robustness. According to recent research, EEG-based BCIs are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which can cause misdiagnosis due to minute, well-crafted disturbances. Evaluating model robustness against such perturbations is therefore critical for ensuring reliable deployment. In this study, we propose a lightweight custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to investigate adversarial robustness in EEG-based BCIs. The suggested method is assessed using two EEG datasets and contrasted with three novel CNN models tailored to EEG, namely EEGNet, DeepConvNet, and SleepEEGNet, under gradient-based adversarial attack scenarios. According to experimental findings, the suggested model continuously performs better in classification under adversarial perturbations compared to baseline models, indicating improved robustness. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight architectures for enhancing the reliability of EEG-based BCI systems under adversarial conditions.
BCI-sift: An automated feature selection toolbox for Brain Computer Interface applications
Advancements in clinical Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) depend on precise and reliable signal interpretation. However, the high-dimensional and noisy nature of data captured from both implanted and non-implanted BCIs poses significant challenges, motivating the use of feature selection algorithms. We introduce BCI-sift (BCI Systematic and Interpretable Feature Tuning), a Python-based toolbox designed to streamline the application of diverse optimization algorithms to BCI datasets for identifying the most relevant features in machine learning tasks. Our scikit-learn-compatible toolbox (github.com/UMCU-RIBS/BCI-sift) simplifies feature selection in BCI tasks by integrating advanced optimization methods. We validated the toolbox on high-density electrocorticography (HD ECoG) data from eight able-bodied participants with 64-128 electrodes implanted over the sensorimotor cortex, who repeatedly spoke 12 words. BCI-sift identified informative neural features across electrode, temporal, and frequency dimensions. The anatomical locations of electrode selections were consistent across participants and aligned with known functional organization of the sensorimotor cortex. Relevant time points clustered around speech production, and the high-frequency band was identified as most informative, in line with prior work. Feature selection improved classification accuracy compared to using all features. BCI-sift provides an accessible and versatile platform for feature selection in BCI research, enabling improved decoding performance, automated feature analysis, and enhanced interpretability. While validated on HD ECoG data, the approach is broadly applicable to other BCI modalities. By enhancing classification accuracy and interpretability, BCI-sift addresses key challenges in developing efficient and transparent BCI systems.
RAG-based EEG-to-Text Translation Using Deep Learning and LLMs
The decoding of linguistic information from electroencephalography (EEG) signals remains an extremely challenging problem in brain-computer interface (BCI) research. In particular, sentence-level decoding from EEG is difficult due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of these recordings. Previous studies tackling this problem have typically failed to surpass random baseline performance unless teacher forcing is used during the inference phase. In this work, we propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based sentence-level EEG-to-text decoding pipeline that combines an EEG encoder aligned with semantic sentence embeddings, a vector retrieval stage, and a large language model (LLM) to refine retrieved sentences into coherent output. Experiments are conducted on the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo) dataset, which contains single-trial EEG recordings collected during silent reading. To evaluate whether the system extracts meaningful information from these EEG signals, the results are compared with a random baseline. In nine subjects, the proposed pipeline outperforms the random baseline, achieving a mean cosine similarity of 0.181 +- 0.022 compared to 0.139 +- 0.029 for the baseline, corresponding to a relative improvement of 30.45%. Statistical analysis further confirms that this improvement is significant, following a strict evaluation workflow where inference is performed without access to ground-truth labels.
nASR: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Layer for Channel-Level EEG Artifact Subspace Reconstruction in Real-Time BCI
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are highly susceptible to artifacts, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio which makes extraction of meaningful neural information challenging. Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is one of the most widely used artifact filtering techniques in EEG-based BCI applications, owing to its real-time applicability. ASR reconstructs artifact-free signals by operating in Principal Component (PC) space within sliding windows. However, ASR performance is critically sensitive to its threshold parameter - an incorrect threshold risks removing task-relevant neural features alongside artifacts. Furthermore, since PCs are linear combinations of all channels, subspace reconstruction in PC space may alter the underlying data structure, potentially discarding essential neural information. To address these limitations, we propose nASR, a novel end-to-end trainable Keras layer that jointly optimizes artifact rejection and downstream decoding. nASR introduces two trainable threshold parameters: K, which governs artifact detection in PC variance space, and L, which quantifies eigen-spread to pinpoint the primary artifact--contributing channels, enabling selective channel-level reconstruction that preserves clean channel information. An ablation study comprising five model variants (m01 - m05), evaluated across two subjects from the BCI Competition IV Dataset 1, confirms that nASR variants consistently outperform traditional ASR on test classification metrics, while achieving a 6-8x reduction in inference time, making nASR a strong candidate for real-time BCI applications demanding both low latency and high decoding performance.
REALM: Retrospective Encoder Alignment for LFP Modeling
Spike activity has been the dominant neural signal for behavior decoding because its high spatiotemporal resolution supports accurate decoding. However, as intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) move toward higher channel counts and wireless operation, the high sampling rates required to record spikes create substantial power and bandwidth demands. Local field potentials (LFPs) offer complementary advantages, including greater long-term stability, lower energy consumption, and lower bandwidth requirements. However, LFP-based decoders often achieve lower accuracy and rely on non-causal architectures that cannot be used directly for real-time deployment. We propose REALM, a retrospective knowledge distillation (RKD) framework for causal LFP behavior decoding. Inspired by offline-to-online distillation in speech recognition, REALM transfers non-causal representational knowledge from a pretrained, multi-session bidirectional LFP teacher to a causal student model. We first pretrain a bidirectional Mamba-2 teacher across multiple recording sessions using continuous masked autoencoding (CMAE), and then distill its representation into a compact causal student using a combined objective of representation alignment and autoencoding. REALM achieves the highest mean accuracy among the compared decoders in both label-free and fine-tuned pipelines, with statistically significant improvements over each baseline, including the state-of-the-art CrossModalDistill. It does so using LFPs alone throughout pretraining, distillation, and decoding, with less than half the parameters of CrossModalDistill's published student and one-tenth of its pretraining time. These results show that a causal LFP-only model can achieve decoding accuracy competitive with a non-causal multi-modal model, offering a practical and scalable approach for next-generation wireless and implantable iBCIs.
NeuroAtlas: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Clinical EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces
Foundation models (FMs) promise to extract unified representations that generalize across downstream tasks. They have emerged across fields, including electroencephalography (EEG), but it is less clear how effective they are in this particular field. Published evaluations differ in datasets, in the EEG-specific preprocessing that might influence reported results, and in the reported metrics, frequently obscuring the clinical relevance in EEG. We introduce NeuroAtlas, the largest EEG benchmark to date: 42 datasets and 260k hours covering clinical EEG (epilepsy, sleep medicine, brain age estimation) and brain-computer interfaces, and include multiple datasets per task along with bespoke clinical evaluation metrics. Besides evaluating EEG-FMs with respect to supervised baselines, we present results from generic time-series FMs. We report three findings. First, EEG-specific FMs do not consistently outperform time-series FMs, which have neither EEG-focused architectures nor been pretrained on EEG. Second, standard machine learning metrics are insufficient to assess clinical utility: thus, we thoroughly evaluate more appropriate measures such as the quality of event-level decision-making, hypnogram-derived features, and the brain-age gap in the domains of epilepsy, sleep, and brain age, respectively. Third, model rankings and performance can vary substantially within domains. We conclude that pretrained models perform largely on par, with only narrow advantages for a few, and that current models do not yet deliver on the promise of an out-of-the-box unified EEG model. NeuroAtlas exposes this gap and provides the datasets and metrics for the next generation of unified EEG FMs.
Implicit Behavioral Decoding from Next-Step Spike Forecasts at Population Scale
Closed-loop brain-computer interfaces often require both a forecast of upcoming neural population activity and a readout of the animal's behavioral state. A single Mamba forecaster, trained only on next-step spike counts at Neuropixels scale, can deliver both in one forward pass. A lightweight per-session linear head reading the model's predicted rates decodes behavior better than the same linear classifier reading the raw spike counts, under matched temporal context. We test on the Steinmetz visual-discrimination benchmark, which spans 39 sessions, roughly 27,000 neurons, and 1,994 held-out trials. Across three training seeds, Mamba's predicted rates decode mouse choice at 75.70.2% trial vote, roughly 2.3 times chance level, and stimulus side at 66.10.6%, about twice chance. Compared to a matched 500 ms-context linear decoder on the raw spike counts, Mamba wins at trial vote by 4-6 pp on response and 4-6 pp on stimulus side. A session-start calibration block of about 100-150 trials brings the readout within 1-2 pp of asymptote, and the full pipeline fits inside the 50 ms bin budget on workstation-class GPUs typical of tethered chronic Neuropixels recordings.
Revisiting Privacy Preservation in Brain-Computer Interfaces: Conceptual Boundaries, Risk Pathways, and a Protection-Strength Grading Framework
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are moving rapidly from laboratory research into clinical, edge, and real-world settings. Under ISO/IEC 8663:2025, a BCI is a direct communication link between central nervous system activity and external software or hardware systems. This link expands privacy risk beyond raw neural-signal leakage: neural data, derived representations, model assets, and decoded outputs can be re-associated with individuals across collection, transmission, storage, training, inference, and feedback, or used to infer information beyond what a task requires. Starting from the general BCI paradigm, this review deffnes privacy-protection boundaries, protection objects, and the relationship between user data privacy and model privacy within a shared risk pathway. It then proposes a three-dimensional framework - protection object, lifecycle stage, and dominant protection-strength level - to classify existing work into four levels of protection strength. Finally, mental privacy and neuroethical risks are treated as open issues, emphasizing that BCI privacy protection should not only obscure data but also disentangle task-irrelevant sensitive information while preserving downstream utility. Keywords: Brain-computer interface, Neural data privacy, User data privacy, Model privacy, Disentanglement of task-irrelevant sensitive information, Protection-strength grading, Neuroethical risks
DANCE: Detect and Classify Events in EEG
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
CORTEG: Foundation Models Enable Cross-Modality Representation Transfer from Scalp to Intracranial Brain Recordings
Intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) offers high-signal-to-noise access to cortical activity for brain-computer interfaces, yet limited per-patient data has led most prior work to rely on small, subject-specific decoders that neglect information shared across patients. We investigate whether large pretrained scalp-EEG foundation models (EEG FMs) can be adapted to ECoG, enabling cross-patient learning and competitive decoding performance while calibrating to a held-out patient in 10-30 minutes on a single GPU. We introduce CORTEG, a cross-modality transfer framework that combines a pretrained EEG FM backbone, an electrode-aware KNNSoftFourier spatial adapter, a dual-stream tokenizer for low-frequency and high-gamma activity, and a leave-one-subject-out fine-tuning strategy. We evaluate CORTEG on two challenging regression tasks: public finger trajectory regression (n=9) and private audio envelope regression (n=16). CORTEG matches or exceeds the strongest task-specific baselines on both tasks: it reaches the highest mean correlation among compared methods on the public finger benchmark (gain not statistically significant on n=9 subjects), with larger and statistically significant gains on the audio task and in low-data per-patient calibration. Feature analyses align with neurophysiology, and latent manifolds capture low-dimensional finger-movement structure. CORTEG provides systematic evidence that scalp-EEG pretraining can be repurposed for ECoG decoding, enabling data-efficient intracranial BCIs that can adapt to new patients.
Explainability of Recurrent Neural Networks for Enhancing P300-based Brain-Computer Interfaces
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on P300 event-related potentials offer promising applications in health, education, and assistive technologies. However, challenges related to inter- and intra-subject variability and the explainability of Deep Learning (DL) models limit their practical deployment. In this work, we present the Post-Recurrent Module (PRM), an additional layer designed to improve both performance and transparency, incorporated into a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture for classifying P300 signals from EEG data. Our approach enables a dual analysis of spatio-temporal signals through both global and local explainability techniques, allowing us not only to identify the most relevant brain regions and critical time intervals involved in classification, but also to interpret model decisions in terms of spatio-temporal EEG patterns consistent with well-stablished neurophysiological descriptions of the P300. Experimental results show a 9% improvement in performance over state of the art, while also revealing the importance of inter- and intra-subject variability, in alignment with established neuroscience literature. By making model decisions transparent and efficient, we present a framework for explainable EEG-based models. This framework is not limited to more efficient P300 detection, but can be generalized to a wide range of EEG-based tasks. Its ability to identify key spatial and temporal features makes it suitable for applications such as motor imagery, steady-state visual evoked potentials, and even cognitive workload assessment.
CFSPMNet: Cross-subject Fourier-guided Spatial-Patch Mamba Network for EEG Motor Imagery Decoding in Stroke Patients
Motor imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) decoding offers a non-invasive route for post-stroke rehabilitation, but cross-patient use remains difficult because pathological neural reorganization changes task-related EEG dynamics, aperiodic activity, local excitability, cross-regional coordination, and trial-level brain-state context. This makes source-learned MI representations unreliable for unseen patients. To address this problem, we propose CFSPMNet, a cross-patient adaptation framework that models post-stroke MI-EEG as latent neural-state organization. CFSPMNet combines a Fourier-Reorganized State Mamba Network (FRSM) with Shared-Private Prototype Matching (SPPM). FRSM represents each trial as a latent physiological token sequence, reorganizes token states in the Fourier domain, and uses Fourier-derived trial context to guide Mamba state-space propagation. SPPM improves target pseudo-label updating by combining semantic confidence with shared-private physiological consistency, filtering confident but physiologically inconsistent target predictions. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on two stroke MI-EEG datasets show that CFSPMNet outperforms representative CNN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, and adaptation-based baselines, achieving average accuracies of 68.23% on XW-Stroke and 73.33% on 2019-Stroke, with gains of 5.63 and 8.25 percentage points over the strongest competitors. Ablation, sensitivity, feature-alignment, pseudo-label selection, and neurophysiological visualization analyses further support the roles of Fourier-domain token-state reorganization and calibrated pseudo-label updating. These results suggest that latent neural-state modeling can improve rehabilitation-oriented cross-patient BCI decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wxk1224/CFSPMNet.
Zero-Shot Imagined Speech Decoding via Imagined-to-Listened MEG Mapping
Decoding imagined speech from non-invasive brain recordings is challenging because imagined datasets are scarce and difficult to align temporally across subjects and sessions In this work, we propose a new approach to the decoding of imagined speech that leverages the richer and more reliably labeled recordings during listening to speech. We collected paired listened and imagined MEG recordings to rhythmic melodic and spoken stimuli from trained musicians. Using trained musicians helped improve temporal alignment across conditions. We then developed a three-stage decoding pipeline that revealed consistent and meaningful relationships between neural activity evoked by imagining and listening to the same stimuli. First, we trained six linear and neural models to map imagined MEG responses to listened responses. We evaluated these models against a null baseline from unseen subjects to validate that the predicted-listening responses preserve stimulus-specific information. In the second stage, we trained a contrastive word decoder exclusively on the listened MEG responses, and evaluated it using four embedding strategies including semantic, acoustic, and phonetic representations. In the third stage, we process the imagined MEG responses from held-out subjects through the mapping pipeline to compute the corresponding listening responses that are then decoded by the listened decoder. Using rank-based analysis, we show that the imagined words are decodable significantly above chance. We shall report here the results of a proof-of-concept implementation to decode imagined speech, where all evaluations are performed on held-out subjects. We also demonstrate that performance improves with training data size, suggesting that this approach is scalable and can directly be made applicable to realistic brain-computer interface scenarios.
UniBCI: Towards a Unified Pretrained Model for Invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces
Modeling invasive neural spike data is fundamental to advancing high-performance brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, existing approaches face critical challenges, including limited-scale heterogeneous data, cross-domain distribution shift, and the intrinsic spatiotemporal complexity of invasive neural signals. In this work, we propose UniBCI, a unified pretrained model for invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces. The model integrates three key components: (1) a context-conditioned spatio-temporal tokenization (CST) scheme that embeds neural signals together with metadata into a shared representation space; (2) a hierarchical Interval-Area Attention (IAA) mechanism that captures patterns of spike dynamics in slots via linear attention and locality dependencies via sliding-window attention; and (3) a scalable self-supervised masked signals reconstruction objective for learning generalizable neural representations from large-scale unlabeled data. We construct a pretraining corpus spanning multiple species, subjects, brain regions, and behavioral experiment paradigms. These heterogeneous recordings are standardize via our proposed unified normalization and tokenization. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that UniBCI achieves SOTA performance across diverse downstream tasks while improving generalization. Moreover, the model achieves a strong balance between accuracy and efficiency, with fewer trainable parameters and lower inference latency. These results suggest that UniBCI provides a practical step toward general-purpose neural foundation models, enabling robust, scalable, and transferable representation learning for invasive neural data. The code for this paper is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniBCI-C805.
On the Identifiability of User Adaptation in Co-Adaptive Neural Interfaces
We analyze identifiability in co-adaptive human-machine systems. We show that closed-loop encoder estimates do not uniquely identify user adaptation, but instead reflect properties of the joint system. We discuss implications for interpreting behavioral adaptation and propose conditions for identification.
MoDAl: Self-Supervised Neural Modality Discovery via Decorrelation for Speech Neuroprosthesis
Speech neuroprosthesis systems decode intended speech from neural activity in the absence of audible output, offering a path to restoring communication for individuals with speech-impairing conditions. Current approaches decode predominantly from motor cortical areas, discarding others -- such as area 44, part of Broca's area -- that may encode complementary linguistic information. We introduce MoDAl (Modality Decorrelation and Alignment), a framework that discovers complementary neural modalities through the interplay of two objectives in a shared projection space. A contrastive loss aligns each of several parallel brain encoders with the text embeddings of a pretrained large language model (LLM), while a decorrelation loss prevents the encoders from coalescing to duplicative representations. We prove that these objectives are in productive tension: Contrastive alignment induces transitive modality coalescence, which decorrelation must counteract for the framework to discover diverse neurolinguistic modalities. On the Brain-to-Text Benchmark '24, MoDAl reduces word error rate (WER) from 26.3% to 21.6% compared to the previous best end-to-end method, with the gain from incorporating previously discarded area 44 signals arising entirely from the decorrelation mechanism. Analysis of the discovered modalities reveals functional specialization: Encoders receiving area 44 input capture structural and syntactic properties (sentence length, grammatical voice, wh-words), consistent with the neurolinguistic understanding of Broca's area.
Brain-Inspired Capture: Evidence-Driven Neuromimetic Perceptual Simulation for Visual Decoding
Visual decoding of neurophysiological signals is a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and computational neuroscience. However, current approaches are often constrained by the systematic and stochastic gaps between neural and visual modalities, largely neglecting the intrinsic computational mechanisms of the Human Visual System (HVS). To address this, we propose Brain-Inspired Capture (BI-Cap), a neuromimetic perceptual simulation paradigm that aligns these modalities by emulating HVS processing. Specifically, we construct a neuromimetic pipeline comprising four biologically plausible dynamic and static transformations, coupled with Mutual Information (MI)-guided dynamic blur regulation to simulate adaptive visual processing. Furthermore, to mitigate the inherent non-stationarity of neural activity, we introduce an evidence-driven latent space representation. This formulation explicitly models uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust neural embeddings. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval across two public benchmarks demonstrate that BI-Cap substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative gains of 9.2% and 8.0%, respectively. We have released the source code on GitHub through the link https://github.com/flysnow1024/BI-Cap.
PA-TCNet: Pathology-Aware Temporal Calibration with Physiology-Guided Target Refinement for Cross-Subject Motor Imagery EEG Decoding in Stroke Patients
Stroke patient cross-subject electroencephalography (EEG) decoding of motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) is essential for motor rehabilitation, yet lesion-related abnormal temporal dynamics and pronounced inter-patient heterogeneity often undermine generalization. Existing adaptation methods are easily misled by pathological slow-wave activity and unstable target-domain pseudo-labels. To address this challenge, we propose PA-TCNet, a pathology-aware temporal calibration framework with physiology-guided target refinement for stroke motor imagery decoding. PA-TCNet integrates two coordinated components. The Pathology-aware Rhythmic State Mamba (PRSM) module decomposes EEG spatiotemporal features into slowly varying rhythmic context and fast transient perturbations, injecting the fused pathological context into selective state propagation to more effectively capture abnormal temporal dynamics. The Physiology-Guided Target Calibration (PGTC) module constructs source-domain sensorimotor region-of-interest templates, imposing physiological consistency constraints and dynamically refining target-domain pseudo-labels, thereby improving adaptation reliability. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on two independent stroke EEG datasets, XW-Stroke and 2019-Stroke, yielded mean accuracies of 66.56% and 72.75%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. These results indicate that jointly modeling pathological temporal dynamics and physiology-constrained pseudo-supervision can provide more robust cross-subject initialization for personalized post-stroke MI-BCI rehabilitation. The implemented code is available at https://github.com/wxk1224/PA-TCNet.
Variational Phasor Circuits for Phase-Native Brain-Computer Interface Classification
We present the Variational Phasor Circuit (VPC), a deterministic classical learning architecture on the continuous unit-circle manifold. Inspired by variational quantum circuits, VPC replaces dense weight matrices with trainable phase shifts, local unitary mixing, and structured interference in the ambient complex space, giving a unified method for binary and multi-class classification of spatially distributed signals. We evaluate VPC on real motor-imagery electroencephalography (EEG) from the PhysioNet Motor Movement/Imagery database (10 subjects, Common Spatial Pattern features, subject-wise cross-validation), where it attains a mean decoding accuracy of -- the highest among standard brain--computer-interface baselines (linear discriminant analysis, logistic regression, RBF-SVM, and a multilayer perceptron) -- using an order of magnitude fewer parameters and the lowest cross-subject variance. We also characterize capacity honestly: with phase-only shifts and unitary mixing, VPC realizes a linear decision function in a fixed cosine/sine feature lifting, well matched to the largely separable band-power structure of EEG but unable to represent parity-type functions, a ceiling that depth does not raise. These results position unit-circle phase interference as a parameter-efficient alternative to dense neural computation for signal classification, and motivate VPC both as a standalone classifier and a front-end for hybrid phasor-quantum systems.
Sparse Bayesian Modeling of EEG Channel Interactions Improves P300 Brain-Computer Interface Performance
Electroencephalography (EEG)-based P300 brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable communication without physical movement by detecting stimulus-evoked neural responses. Accurate and efficient decoding remains challenging due to high dimensionality, temporal dependence, and complex interactions across EEG channels. Existing approaches often treat channels independently or rely on black-box models, limiting interpretability and personalization. We propose a sparse Bayesian time-varying regression framework that explicitly models pairwise EEG channel interactions while performing temporal feature selection, where a relaxed-thresholded Gaussian process prior induces structured sparsity in both channel-specific and interaction effects, enabling interpretable identification of task-relevant channels and channel pairs. Applied to a public P300 speller dataset of 55 participants, our method achieves a 96.4% median character-level accuracy using all sequence repetitions and attains the best overall decoding performance among competing statistical and deep learning approaches. Incorporating channel interactions yields subgroup-specific gains in character-level accuracy, particularly among participants abstained from alcohol (median 7%, up to 14%). Importantly, our approach improves median BCI-Utility by more than 10% at its optimal operating point, achieving peak throughput after only six sequence repetitions. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling structured EEG channel interactions within a principled Bayesian framework enhances accuracy and user-centric throughput, and supports personalization in P300 BCI systems.
NeuroSketch: A Practical Design Recipe for Neural Decoding
Neural decoding is fundamental to brain-computer interfaces, with growing applications in healthcare. Previous research has focused on leveraging signal processing and deep learning methods to enhance neural decoding performance. However, systematic guidance on architectural design for neural decoding remains limited. In this study, we develop NeuroSketch, a practical design recipe for neural decoding, through a basic architecture study followed by macro- and micro-level optimization. Comparing nine basic architectures, we find that CNN-2D outperforms other architectures in neural decoding tasks and explore its effectiveness from temporal and spatial perspectives. Building on this backbone, we combine gradual feature-map expansion and early downsampling at the macro level with grouped convolutions at the micro level. These choices form the recipe, which we instantiate as NeuroSketch-Base (1.4M parameters) and NeuroSketch-Large (4.2M parameters). The recipe is developed and evaluated through nearly 5,000 experiments across eight tasks spanning visual, auditory, and speech modalities and EEG, SEEG, and ECoG signals. Against ten baselines, the two variants collectively achieve the best accuracy on each task. Our code is available at https://github.com/Galaxy-Dawn/NeuroSketch.
Geometry-Aware Deep Congruence Networks for Manifold Learning in Cross-Subject Motor Imagery
Cross-subject motor imagery decoding remains a fundamental challenge in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces due to substantial inter-subject variability. Recent approaches have leveraged Riemannian geometry by representing EEG signals as covariance matrices on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. However, existing methods primarily focus on manifold-based representations while largely overlooking subject-specific variations in covariance dispersion and orientation. In this work, we address these challenges through geometry-aware congruence transformations and propose three complementary models: (i) Discriminative Congruence Transform (DCT), (ii) Deep Linear DCT (DLDCT), and (iii) Deep DCT-UNet (DDCT-UNet). The proposed models are evaluated both as manifold alignment modules for downstream classifiers and as end-to-end discriminative architectures optimized via cross-entropy with a custom logistic regression head. Experiments on challenging cross-subject motor imagery benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in transductive decoding performance, achieving 2-3% higher accuracy than strong baselines. These results highlight the effectiveness of geometry-aware congruence learning for mitigating inter-subject variability in EEG decoding.
Cortical-SSM: A Deep State Space Model for Motor Imagery Decoding from EEG Signals
Classification of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals obtained during motor imagery (MI) has substantial application potential, including communication assistance and rehabilitation support for patients with motor impairments. These signals remain inherently susceptible to physiological artifacts (e.g., eye blinking and swallowing), which pose persistent challenges. Although Transformer-based approaches for classifying EEG signals have been widely adopted, they often struggle to capture fine-grained dependencies within them. To overcome these limitations, we propose Cortical-SSM, a novel architecture that extends deep state space models to capture integrated dependencies of EEG signals across temporal, spatial, and frequency domains. We validated our method across two large-scale public MI EEG datasets containing more than 50 subjects. Our method outperformed baseline methods on both benchmarks. Furthermore, visual explanations derived from our model indicate that it effectively captures neurophysiologically relevant regions of EEG signals. These results indicate that Cortical-SSM provides a robust and interpretable alternative to attention-based architectures for MI EEG decoding. By enabling physiologically grounded feature learning, our method advances the reliability of subject-independent EEG classification and supports the development of practical and clinically deployable brain-computer interface systems.
EEG-based AI-BCI Wheelchair Advancement: Transformer-Based Learning with Motor Imagery for Brain Computer Interface
This paper presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated approach to Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)-based wheelchair development, utilizing a motor imagery right-left-hand movement mechanism for control. The system is designed to simulate wheelchair navigation based on motor imagery right and left-hand movements using electroencephalogram (EEG) data. A pre-filtered dataset, obtained from an open-source EEG repository, was segmented into arrays of 19x200 to capture the onset of hand movements. The data was acquired at a sampling frequency of 200Hz. The system integrates a Tkinter-based interface for simulating wheelchair movements, offering users a functional and intuitive control system. We propose TFormerEEG, a Transformer-driven deep learning architecture, for motor imagery EEG classification. The model achieves a test accuracy of 93.04% compared with various machine learning baseline models, including XGBoost, EEGNet, and an EEG-Deformer model. The TFormerEEG achieved a mean accuracy of 91.18% through stratified cross-validation, showcasing the effectiveness of this model.
Decoding the Multimodal Mind: Generalizable Brain-to-Text Translation via Multimodal Alignment and Adaptive Routing
Decoding language from the human brain remains a grand challenge for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Current approaches typically rely on unimodal brain representations, neglecting the brain's inherently multimodal processing. Inspired by the brain's associative mechanisms, where viewing an image can evoke related sounds and linguistic representations, we propose a unified framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to align brain signals with a shared semantic space encompassing text, images, and audio. A router module dynamically selects and fuses modality-specific brain features according to the characteristics of each stimulus. Experiments on various fMRI datasets with textual, visual, and auditory stimuli demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving an 8.48% improvement on the most commonly used benchmark. We further extend our framework to EEG and MEG data, demonstrating flexibility and robustness across varying temporal and spatial resolutions. To our knowledge, this is the first unified BCI architecture capable of robustly decoding multimodal brain activity across diverse brain signals and stimulus types, offering a flexible solution for real-world applications.