Electroencephalography Spatial Super-Resolution

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Latest in Electroencephalography Spatial Super-Resolution

Jul 28, 2026cs.AI

Joint Text-Audio Alignment for EEG-to-Text Decoding in Chinese Speech Production and Perception

Decoding speech information directly from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) into text provides a potential non-invasive neural communication pathway for individuals with severe speech and motor impairments. Compared with invasive approaches such as electrocorticography, EEG is safer and more widely deployable, yet substantially more challenging to decode.This challenge is exacerbated for Chinese sentence decoding, which must handle a high-dimensional output space with thousands of characters, severe inter-subject variability, and low signal-to-noise ratios for text alignment.Existing methods commit to a single supervisory axis---either text semantics or audio acoustic features---yet neither can simultaneously satisfy the demands of sentence-level discriminability and fine-grained temporal resolution required for large-vocabulary Chinese decoding. We introduce EEGAlign, a novel parameter-efficient framework that jointly aligns EEG with two axes---text alignment with BGE-M3 text embeddings and audio alignment with wav2vec~2.0 speech features via contrastive learning followed by CTC character-sequence decoding. On ChineseEEG-2 data, EEGAlign yields state-of-the-art closed-set sentence classification performance, reaching up to 82.37% Top-1 accuracy on Reading Aloud EEG and 41.43% on Passive Listening EEG out of 101 candidates. Ablation studies show that the two alignment axes are highly complementary: combining them yields consistently better performance than either alone. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on decoding large-vocabulary Chinese sentences from non-invasive EEG during overt speech production, and achieving strong classification performance with relatively large closed-set candidate-sentence setting.
Tian Zheng, Xurong Xie, Xinxin Zhu +2
Jul 28, 2026cs.HC

From Dyad to Triad: Eliciting XAI Requirements in Stroke Rehabilitation

Eliciting explainable AI (XAI) requirements from stroke survivors presents a methodological challenge with direct implications for the design of trustworthy brain-computer interfaces for rehabilitation. How can patients and caregivers articulate preferences about algorithmic transparency when they lack conceptual frameworks for explainability, and when standard elicitation approaches are structurally inadequate for users with acquired communication disorders? We present a video-based scaffolding protocol for XAI requirements elicitation, developed and piloted in a rehabilitation context. In a formative study with three stroke survivors (two with moderate-to-severe aphasia) and three caregivers, facilitators employed four scaffolding approaches alongside the videos: 1) analogical bridging mapping AI states to familiar systems, 2) projective personas depersonalising sensitive topics, 3) binary forcing reducing cognitive load, and 4) extended response time. These approaches successfully surfaced heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting XAI needs across participants. Reflexive analysis additionally revealed three systematic facilitation biases, namely, normative bias, hypothesis confirmation bias, and presence effect, where scaffolding inadvertently shaped responses. We present these as protocol risk guidelines for practitioners. Together, the protocol and guidelines constitute a reusable methodological contribution for eliciting patient-facing XAI requirements in rehabilitation, arguing that such elicitation is a necessary prerequisite for trustworthy human-machine systems design, not an optional preliminary.
Param Rajpura, Yogesh Kumar Meena
Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

LGFNet: A CTC-Guided Local-Global Fusion Framework for Single-Channel Sleep Staging

Sleep staging remains challenging due to long-range temporal dependencies, ambiguous stage transitions-particularly in N1-and substantial distribution shifts across subjects, sampling rates, and EEG montages. These difficulties are further amplified in single-channel, low-latency scenarios required by wearable and real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose LGFNet, a CTC-guided sequence-to-sequence framework for robust sleep staging. LGFNet introduces a Local-Global Fusion encoder that jointly models fine-grained temporal dynamics and long-range sleep structure, overcoming the limitations of conventional serial hybrid architectures. A CTC-Attention joint training paradigm is adopted to unify temporal alignment with context-dependent modeling, enabling more accurate recognition of stage boundaries and transitions. Furthermore, a three-stage decoding strategy is devised, leveraging CTC-guided decoding and Viterbi-based smoothing to reduce error accumulation and enforce physiological consistency. Extensive cross-dataset evaluations on five public benchmarks demonstrate that LGFNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art single-channel methods. In particular, on Sleep-EDF-78, LGFNet surpasses DMIN by +1.27% accuracy, +1.74% macro-F1, and +1.93% kappa, with pronounced gains on N1 and transition segments, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization across diverse sampling rates, montages, and recording environments.
Chongjian Wang, Zhenghang Hou, Junjie Gao +3
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

CogEEGAgent: Toward Autonomous Cognitive EEG Analysis with Grounded Execution and Selection-Aware Verification

Electroencephalography (EEG) analysis in cognitive studies requires specialized expertise and involves many defensible choices over contrasts, channels, time windows, and statistical tests. LLM agents can translate varied natural-language questions into analysis choices, offering a flexible interface for automation. Yet fluent reports alone cannot establish that an agent selected the requested analysis or evaluated a confirmatory claim independently of adaptive search. We present CogEEGAgent, a cognitive-EEG analysis agent grounded in MNE-Python. Its EEG-specific scientific harness separates semantic from scientific authority. The LLM interprets intent and proposes registered analyses, while deterministic components validate typed contracts, control confirmation access, and authorize evidence-bound release. On a prespecified routing benchmark, CogEEGAgent maps language to registered analyses more accurately than a matched deterministic router, while matched preflight makes both systems abstain whenever required. In an externally model-authored, outcome-blind campaign, the complete system releases supported analyses with participant-disjoint confirmation and blocks prespecified capability hazards and lifecycle-reuse requests. Policy stress testing shows that held-out confirmation curbs false positives from uncorrected adaptive search. Together, these studies establish bounded autonomy and an auditable automation framework for cognitive-EEG workflows. More broadly, they show how scientific agents can combine flexible language understanding with fail-closed control over inference and release.
Dengzhe Hou, Lingyu Jiang, Fangzhou Lin +1
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

What EEG Foundation Models Encode: Dataset Identity and a Negative-Control Suite for Clinical Benchmarks

Pretrained EEG foundation models are proposed for clinical decoding, but whether reported gains transfer across populations or survive negative controls is unclear. We benchmark LaBraM, EEGMamba, CBraMod, REVE, LEAD, BENDR, and BIOT on five clinical tasks across four datasets. Primary analyses use frozen linear probes with subject-disjoint LOSO or grouped five-fold validation. Because CAUEEG releases no patient identifiers, it is evaluated at recording level with a patient-disjoint sensitivity. We challenge apparent gains using stronger classical comparators, label permutation, scrambled-label fine-tuning, and random-initialisation controls. In a matched 19-channel CAUEEG evaluation (Normal/MCI/Dementia; N = 1,187 recordings), classical features achieve 0.734 macro-AUROC versus 0.699 for BIOT, 0.669 for CBraMod, and 0.568 for REVE. A patient-disjoint sensitivity retains the classical-over-REVE ordering (0.717 versus 0.565). Dataset identity is decoded from frozen REVE embeddings at or near ceiling across Western-Korean and Western-Western pairs, including after PCA-50 and removal of line-frequency and amplitude-scale information. This establishes dataset membership, not a causal site or population effect. A matched random-initialised encoder exceeds pretrained REVE on CAUEEG (0.659 versus 0.570). On CHB-MIT cross-subject ictal detection (n = 23), REVE reaches 0.793, versus 0.739 for the best enhanced nonlinear comparator, 0.701 for random initialisation, and 0.505 for raw-signal random features. Because preprocessing removes absolute amplitude, this does not establish superiority over every plausible handcrafted baseline. Conclusions change materially after montage matching, patient-overlap checks, stronger comparators, and representation controls. We distill these checks into a reporting protocol for clinical EEG foundation-model studies.
Marzieh Zare
Jul 27, 2026cs.HC

EEGForceFusion: Joint Tokenised-Continuous Representation Learning for Subject-Independent Grasp Force Decoding

Brain-machine interfaces provide a link between neural activity and external devices, enabling restoration of motor function and advancing human-machine interaction using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG). However, continuous grasp force decoding remains challenging due to complex temporal dynamics, high inter-subject variability, and limited generalisation of existing approaches. To address this, we propose a hybrid EEG decoding framework that jointly models continuous and tokenised representations, enabling capture of both fine-grained neural structure and long-range temporal dependencies. The proposed approach integrates convolutional-recurrent representation learning, quantisation-based tokenisation, and transformer-based temporal modelling within a unified fusion-based regression architecture. Experimental evaluation on the WAY-EEG-GAL dataset under strict leave-one-subject-out conditions achieves R2R^2 = 0.817 in offline settings and R2R^2 = 0.793 in simulated real-time evaluation, with latency suitable for real-time deployment. These results demonstrate strong cross-subject generalisation and highlight the practicality of hybrid continuous-tokenised representations for real-time EEG-based force decoding in assistive robotics, neuro-rehabilitation, and human-machine interaction.
Sankalp Sunil Turankar, Yogesh Kumar Meena
Jul 27, 2026cs.HC

Towards simultaneous decoding of kinetic and kinematic movement parameters during grasp and lift task by noninvasive brain imaging

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can assist individuals with limited mobility, such as stroke survivors or amputees. One of the key challenges in developing BMIs is expanding their usability and control, which can be achieved by accurately decoding multiple kinematic and kinetic parameters. To address this, we propose three regression models: partial least squares regressor, multilayered perceptron, and attention based regressor, to decode multiple movement parameters from EEG signals. We evaluated these models on the WAY EEG GAL dataset, focusing on their performance under subject specific and subject independent conditions with two strategies: a single model for all parameters and a baseline with separate models for each parameter. Among all regressors, the attention based regressor achieved the best performance, with an R2R^2 of 0.8 and a latency of 29.2 milliseconds, demonstrating significant improvement in simultaneous multi parameter decoding. However, its performance dropped for single parameter decoding. The multi layered perceptron showed more consistent but lower accuracy across both decoding types (R2R^2 = 0.49). These findings highlight the potential of attention based models for real time multi command BMI systems and contribute to the development of more intuitive control devices.
Parth G. Dangi, Yogesh Kumar Meena
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

A Cyclic Adaptation-Generalization Framework with Uncertainty-Guided Self-Paced Learning for Long-Term Brain-Machine Interfaces

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs), which link the brain to external devices, hold great potential in rehabilitation, human performance augmentation, and human-centered robotics. However, invasive BMIs face a critical challenge for long-term deployment due to neural drift, which degrades decoding performance over time and necessitates frequent recalibration. Existing methods designed to mitigate neural drift typically rely on either domain adaptation (DA) or domain generalization (DG) alone and often fail to capture fine-grained distribution shifts across neural subdomains, resulting in limited performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Uncertainty-guided Self-paced Cycling (UnSPC), a robust framework that synergizes DA and DG for target domain refining under an Uncertainty-guided Self-paced Pseudo-labeling (UnSPL) mechanism. To handle subdomain neural drift across domains, UNSPL is proposed to iteratively mine reliable pseudo-labeled samples with a noise-robust ranking strategy for further fine-tuning. Leveraging these high-quality samples, we introduce a novel Cycling Adaptation and Generalization (CycAG) strategy, which integrates DA and DG within an iterative cycle to progressively mitigate both global and subdomain drift. This cyclic process enables effective alignment to evolving target distributions while preserving robust and transferable representations, thereby mitigating performance degradation under long-term neural drifts. Extensive experiments on multiple neural decoding datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of UnSPC. To our knowledge, our proposed UnSPC is the first to cyclically integrate DA and DG with pseudo-labeling, paving the way toward stable long-term BMI controls.
Jiyu Wei, Di Hong, Zhanjie Zhang +3
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Self-Supervised Consistency Enhanced Disentangled Learning for Neural Decoding Generalization in Brain-Machine Interface

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) provide a direct communication pathway between the brain and external devices, enabling humans to control assistive and robotic technologies, with potential applications in rehabilitation, human motor augmentation, and human-centered robotics. However, due to neural drift, the performance of BMIs decreases over time, posing challenges for long-term viability, particularly for invasive BMIs (iBMIs). Existing solutions suffer from two main drawbacks: (i) difficulty in learning robust neural representations, and (ii) neglecting that neural drift varies across motor parameters (e.g., velocity, direction, and speed). To overcome these limitations, we propose Self-Supervised Consistency enhanced Disentangled Learning (SSCDL), a neural decoding generalization framework built on two key innovations. We first design a backbone model named Consistency enhanced Neural Decoder (CND), using a novel teacher-student consistency constraint with simulated neural signal perturbations to learn robust representations invariant to neural drift. Then, we employ three dedicated CNDs under the Complementary-Disentangled Generalization (CDG) mechanism, which disentangles motor signals into velocity, direction, and speed with inspiration from neural preference theory. This disentangled learning enables SSCDL to capture invariant neural representations from diverse neural preference perspectives, significantly enhancing cross-day generalization. Extensive experimental results show that SSCDL delivers state-of-the-art decoding performance, exhibiting high robustness and cross-day stability. These capabilities underscore its strong potential for long-term interaction in human-centric robotic and fine-grained assistive applications.
Jiyu Wei, Di Hong, Zhanjie Zhang +3
Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

ATCNet-CIAM for Multi-Session Motor Imagery EEG Signal Classification

Motor imagery (MI)-based electroencephalography is widely used in non-invasive brain--computer interfaces (BCIs), but robust decoding remains challenging due to inter-subject variability and cross-session non-stationarity. This work proposes ATCNet-CIAM, an enhanced attention temporal convolutional network that integrates a lightweight channel-integrated attention module (CIAM) into the ATCNet framework to improve channel-spatial feature representation for MI decoding. The proposed model is evaluated on BCI Competition IV-2a, BCI Competition IV-2b, and the multi-day WBCIC-MI dataset under standard, within-session, and cross-session protocols. Experimental results show that ATCNet-CIAM achieves 86.32% accuracy on BCI IV-2a and 87.96% on BCI IV-2b under the standard protocol, while reaching 89.46% and 83.64% in the within-session WBCIC-MI on 2C and 3C, respectively. The proposed framework consistently improves classification stability and robustness under session-varying conditions, and ablation study confirms the complementary contribution of the proposed architectural components.
Le Huu Son Hai, Nguyen Chi Hai, Truong Viet Vu +3
Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

Bayesian Complete-Pooling in Cross-Subject Classification for Motor Imagery Electroencephalogram

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have long sought calibration-free operation, but classifiers are typically benchmarked by discrimination alone, blind to whether predicted probabilities are well calibrated - a meaningful gap given nonstationary electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and the risk of overconfident point-estimate classifiers under distribution shift. We conducted a large-scale study contrasting Bayesian complete-pooling models against frequentist baselines for cross-subject, left-hand versus right-hand motor imagery EEG classification across 20 datasets. Six frequentist pipelines were each paired with an analogous Bayesian pipeline sharing identical feature engineering, fit via Markov chain Monte Carlo posterior sampling. Our primary metric was the Brier score, decomposed into reliability and resolution, alongside AUROC for discrimination and Shannon entropy for sharpness. Each metric was analyzed via random-effects meta-analysis (REML, Knapp-Hartung adjustment), verified by leave-one-out influence analysis. Bayesian complete-pooling produced statistically but not practically significant improvements in reliability and increases in predictive uncertainty (lower sharpness); Brier score, resolution, and discrimination showed no significant differences. Between-study heterogeneity was low across all metrics, though the reliability result was sensitive to leave-one-out removal. We additionally profiled computational cost, finding that Bayesian pipelines consumed roughly thirteen times more energy than their frequentist counterparts, a cost that remains modest relative to common household appliances. These results suggest that Bayesian complete-pooling alone offers limited practical benefit for cross-subject motor imagery classification, and that partial-pooling across subjects and sessions is a more promising direction for future work.
Ethan Davis
Jul 25, 2026eess.SP

Not All EEG Moments Are Equal: Position-Adaptive Time Scheduling for EEG Generation

Electroencephalography (EEG) generation is essential for alleviating data scarcity and enabling large scale neural modeling in brain computer interface applications. However, existing flow based approaches assume that every channel and every time segment within a sample shares a single global time progression, overlooking the fact that not all EEG moments are equal. To address this overlooked heterogeneity, we propose an adaptive EEG generation framework built on conditional flow matching. The framework introduces Position-Adaptive Time Scheduling, which tracks per position reconstruction error to modulate a position specific time progress within the flow matching trajectory. It further incorporates Factorized Spatio-Temporal Attention and a frequency aligned multi resolution spectral consistency loss to model inter channel dependencies induced by volume conduction and compensate for the power law spectral bias of EEG, thereby improving the quality of generated signals. Extensive experiments on three EEG datasets with distinct acquisition protocols and task semantics show that our framework consistently outperforms the strongest baseline, reducing TS-FID by up to 62.2% and improving downstream classification accuracy gain by up to 6.77 percentage points. These results suggest that the proposed method represents a promising step toward scalable, high fidelity data augmentation for real world brain computer interface applications.
Boheng Liu, Ziyu Li, Chenghua Duan +2
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

Interpretable EEG biomarkers with bag-of-waves: Spatial and temporal waveform dictionaries for low-data regimes

Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used to diagnose neurological conditions, but its analysis usually relies on either predefined spectral features or deep neural networks. Predefined features carry a strong bias, since they fix in advance what counts as informative, while deep neural networks and foundation models are hard to interpret and need large amounts of data and compute. We present bag-of-waves, an interpretable framework that learns a small dictionary of recurring EEG waveform templates, called atoms, using shift-invariant k-means without labels. The continuous EEG is then turned into a sequence of atom tokens, whose counts feed a simple downstream classifier or clustering step. We extend this representation in two ways: we add atom-to-atom transitions, which we call n- grams, to capture temporal structure, and we move from single-channel atoms to regional and cross-channel spatial atoms for the multichannel case. We test the method on three complementary datasets, each probing a different aspect: single-channel mouse genotype clustering with only sixteen animals (the low-data and temporal case), resting-state dementia classification (the spatial case), and the TUEV benchmark, a six-way classification of clinical EEG events (a high-data comparison against strong deep and foundation baselines). Across all three datasets, bag-of-waves achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art deep and foundation models. Yet, it operates with a fraction of the parameter count and provides full interpretability: because every atom corresponds to an inspectable waveform, the method explicitly recovers known clinical morphologies that a neurophysiologist can directly validate. Its main advantage is that it works in the low-data regime where heavier models are a poor fit.
Athanasios Papastathopoulos-Katsaros, Steven T. Lee, Lin Yao +4
Jul 24, 2026cs.HC

Universal BCI Personalization: One API for Frozen EEG Trunks and Foundation Models

Frozen EEG encoders proliferate; per-model fine-tune defaults do not scale. We present Nimbus Personalizer: one contract encode to Bayesian head to BrainState (optional affine mid-tier) that sits on heterogeneous frozen trunks without a new personalization stack per architecture. Thesis (systems): the contribution is the trunk-agnostic API - not LDA-on-embeddings as an ML novelty - so OEMs integrate once and swap trunks. Evidence: the same surface runs on five classical trunks EEGNet, Shallow, Deep, Conformer, ATCNet x four MI datasets (18 cells) and on a foundation encoder (REVE) under the same Personalizer. Where embedding capacity exists, the head is a cheap default mid-point versus warm-start fine-tune or PEFT, costing orders of magnitude less adaptation wall time while recovering much of the fine-tune accuracy gain; calibration-only-when-clean holds in 12/18 cells. Head gains are supporting evidence that the API is useful where capacity exists. Subject-level confidence intervals identify the clearest dataset and span zero elsewhere. All results are exploratory (subject-level bootstrap, no confirmatory tests); the decision logic for when to escalate adaptation is addressed in our companion work on the control layer.
Sergey Musienko
Jul 24, 2026q-bio.NC

Subject-Level Heterogeneity in EEG Motor Imagery Decoding: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Portfolio-Based Reduction of the Search Space

Robust EEG motor imagery decoding remains limited by strong inter-individual variability, making it difficult to identify pipelines that generalize across users. We present a large-scale, standardized within-session benchmark of decoding pipelines across three public datasets: Cho2017 (52 subjects), PhysionetMI (109 subjects), and Zhou2016 (4 subjects). Using a common MOABB LeftRightImagery setting, two frequency bands (8-15 Hz and 8-30 Hz), and a broad combination of feature extraction, preprocessing, and classification steps, we analyzed 216,714 raw evaluation rows, which after structured aggregation yielded 44,928, 109,000, and 4,192 subject-level observations respectively. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) consistently defined the strongest methodological families, though their relative ordering was dataset-dependent. On Cho2017, the best family-level mean accuracy came from cov-tgsp in 8-30 Hz (0.712 +/- 0.140), whereas Zhou2016 favored CSP (0.832 +/- 0.121 in 8-15 Hz). These aggregate rankings concealed substantial subject-level heterogeneity: 42 distinct winning pipelines across 52 Cho2017 subjects, and 93 across 109 PhysionetMI subjects. We then used the benchmark as an empirical performance landscape for building compact portfolios of pipelines of size K. Several construction procedures were compared, including a ranking-based Top-K Mean heuristic and search-based strategies. Results were broadly consistent, with Top-K Mean giving the best trade-off. A single best global pipeline already retained 94.2% of the oracle in Cho2017 and 81.8% in PhysionetMI; at K = 12, oracle retention rose to 96.5% and 90.0%. The landscape is therefore subject-dependent, and this heterogeneity can be exploited through compact portfolios that make personalization more feasible.
Xavier Vasques, Paul Barbaste, Olivier Oullier
Jul 23, 2026q-bio.NC

Cross-Cohort Spectral-Temporal Dissociation in Frozen EEG Foundation-Model Representations

Objective. We tested whether frozen representations from five EEG foundation models support decoding of long-range temporal correlations, measured as the detrended-fluctuation-analysis (DFA) exponent of the alpha-band amplitude envelope. Approach. REVE, LaBraM, BENDR, CBraMod, and BIOT were evaluated in CAUEEG and BrainLat. A common 240 s estimator used 8-13 Hz filtering, DFA over 2-23.8 s, artifact masking, and quality control. One fixed nested-cross-validation readout predicted DFA and a fixed-mode aperiodic exponent. Controls tested pre-pool order sensitivity and aperiodic residualization. Results. CAUEEG included 764 recordings and BrainLat 79. BIOT decoded DFA in CAUEEG (R-squared = 0.232; conditional subject-bootstrap 95 percent interval, 0.121-0.310), and CBraMod was positive but imprecise (R-squared = 0.121; 0.003-0.214). Neither replicated in BrainLat, where all five point estimates were negative. In contrast, CBraMod and BIOT decoded the aperiodic exponent in both cohorts (R-squared = 0.459-0.757). BIOT remained positive after removal of the measured linear aperiodic association in matched CAUEEG data (R-squared = 0.240). The post-hoc order control was batch- and configuration-sensitive. Because chronological EEG epochs are not exchangeable, it was descriptive, not an LRTC-specific test. No revised DFA transfer direction passed source-label permutation testing. Cohort membership was near-ceiling decodable from all five embeddings, but this is not a pure site effect. Significance. CBraMod and BIOT show a replicated, model-specific spectral-temporal dissociation: aperiodic decoding is present in both cohorts, whereas alpha-envelope DFA decoding is cohort-dependent. These findings bound the evaluated readouts; they do not establish representational absence or an architectural cause. Transfer and clinical associations remain exploratory.
Marzieh Zare
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

MSBraM: A Multi-scale Self-supervised Brain Foundation Model for Hierarchical EEG Dynamics Learning

Self-supervised foundation models have recently shown strong potential for electroencephalogram (EEG)-based analysis. However, existing approaches struggle to capture the inherently multi-scale temporal structure of EEG signals, where local neural patterns and long-range dependencies jointly encode task-relevant information. This limitation hampers cross-scale representation learning and generalization across diverse downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose MSBraM, a Multi-Scale self-supervised Brain foundation Model designed to learn hierarchical EEG representations. MSBraM follows a two-stage pretraining framework. First, a multi-scale neural tokenizer discretizes raw EEG signals into semantic codes at different temporal resolutions via vector-quantized reconstruction. Second, the model is pretrained to predict masked codes using a curriculum multi-scale masking strategy, progressively integrating fine-grained local patterns with global temporal context. We pretrain MSBraM on over 2,400 hours of EEG data and evaluate it across 10 downstream tasks on 12 public datasets. Extensive experiments show that MSBraM achieves superior performance on other state-of-the-art pretrained models, demonstrating strong generalization and transferability. These results indicate that explicitly modeling multi-scale temporal dynamics is critical for effective EEG foundation models.
Tao Zhou, Jing Han, Lingyu Shu +1
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

Multimodal Pretraining for Generalizable EEG Representation Learning

Electroencephalography (EEG) models used for epilepsy are often limited to specific datasets and tasks. This limited approach can make it challenging to apply these models across different datasets or in various situations. However, recent studies in foundation models and self-supervised learning suggest that an adaptable EEG backbone could support a range of EEG related tasks. In this study, we have developed a multimodal EEG foundation model that combines a raw signal encoder based on the Mamba architecture, a Vision Transformer (ViT)-style encoder for time-frequency data, and a lightweight encoder for text, all within a shared embedding space. The pretraining process relies on several innovative techniques, such as masked modeling, cross-view contrastive alignment, and temporal consistency losses. These methods are designed to create rich, seizure-relevant representations without requiring labeled data. To assess the efficacy and generalization of our pretrained model, we fine-tuned it on the canonical CHB-MIT seizure detection benchmark and additional seizure detection datasets, and conducted extensive experiments comparing different model variants. On the standard CHB-MIT split, our best single model achieved an AUROC of 0.874, and an ensemble variant reached 0.878 AUROC, representing state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark. In addition to standard train-test splits, we evaluated performance under a leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) protocol, which is rarely reported in prior EEG seizure modeling work and highlights the difficulty of patient-independent seizure detection, with a mean LOSO balanced accuracy of 0.558 across 19 subjects. Across datasets and evaluation settings, our multimodal foundation model enabled robust seizure detection and straightforward adaptation to new seizure detection scenarios, while also supporting interpretable seizure localization.
Targol Bakhtiarvand, Jugal Kalita, Adham Atyabi
Jul 22, 2026q-bio.NC

Transition-Related Potentials as Markers of Narrative Comprehension in Continuous EEG

Harnessing the potential of electroencephalography (EEG) for brain research is fundamentally limited by intrinsic noise and the diffuse projection of brain-generated activity over the scalp. The standard event-related potential (ERP) paradigm addresses this limitation by relying on repeated independent trials, albeit at the cost of moving away from naturalistic experimental conditions. As a more naturalistic alternative, we collected continuous EEG while participants watched short films and extracted potentials aligned to sharp cinematic transitions (cuts). We demonstrate that such transition-related potentials (TRPs) exhibit canonical ERP-like temporal structure associated with significant information processing. By comparing coherent films with scene-scrambled versions containing matched post-cut sensory input, we find that these responses are systematically shaped by narrative context. We then show that the cut-related EEG signature can be recovered directly from group-averaged continuous recordings with a compact deep neural network (DNN). The detector generalized across films and subject groups, and the resulting TRPs reproduced the main context-dependent effects observed for manually annotated cuts. These results indicate that narrative context leaves a measurable signature in EEG responses, that this signature can be detected directly in continuous recordings, and that such detections provide a semi-automated framework for analyzing how viewers process and understand film narratives. We propose that the method outlined here can be adapted to parse EEG responses to other forms of continuous stimulation, providing a general tool for probing experimental conditions that are closer to natural human experience.
Bálint Csanády, Péter Vedres, Kristóf Zsolt Makó +6
Jul 22, 2026q-bio.NC

Computer Vision Based Neurology Brain Activity Rejection Architecture and Implementation

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a valuable and widely applied tool for investigating brain disorders and behavioral changes. It offers a minimally restrictive and non-invasive method. However, challenges in using EEG for cognitive development studies include temporal resolution, signal source localization, and EEG artifacts. Careful consideration of these factors is essential for informed application of EEG technology. Independent component analysis (ICA) effectively isolates source generator processes from signals recorded by multiple, adjacent EEG scalp electrodes. Although ICA decomposition requires manual inspection, selection, and interpretation of independent components (ICs), this process is time consuming and demands expertise. Automated IC classification can achieve sufficient accuracy, expediting large scale EEG research and enabling near real time applications in conjunction with brain activity rejection tasks, which are crucial for medical specialists. This study introduces an automated computer vision based ICA rejection labeling tool compatible with widely used software interfaces like ICLabel and EEGLab. By automating the manual task, the proposed system reduces processing time by 7200 fold and achieves an accuracy of 89.45%.
Zag ElSayed, Nathan Suer, Grace Westerkamp +4
Jul 22, 2026cs.CV

Real-Time EEG Cap Electrode Detection for Guided Point-of-Care Placement

We present a two-stage vision system that detects EEG cap electrodes in a live webcam stream and validates their anatomical placement in real time. A single-class YOLO detector localises electrodes; a geometric stage assigns each detection to a named 10-20 role from facial landmarks. Evaluating under subject-disjoint leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation across five subjects wearing the clinically-validated Small/Medium/Large caps, the detector attains mAP@.5 = 0.94 +/- 0.07 across five held-out folds (0.96 pooled). A dedicated leave-one-cap-out axis, holding out every frame of a cap regardless of subject, leaves Medium and Large mAP@.5 within 0.01 of LOSO (0.97, 0.97) while Small drops to 0.72 +/- 0.28, a gap confounded with subject familiarity rather than cap style. Geometric augmentation (rotation, perspective, mixup) improves in-plane-roll robustness and temporal-electrode recall at no inference cost, and a landmark-driven head crop extends the usable distance range, lifting mAP@.5 from 0.23 to 0.45 at 0.6 x apparent scale. A compact mobile-candidate backbone (YOLOv10n) keeps the detector at real-time throughput (19 FPS) on a commodity CPU at 640 px.
William Lehn-Schiøler, Mads Sverker Nilsson, Nicki Skafte Detlefsen
Jul 22, 2026cs.CV

Generative Augmentation for EEG Motor Imagery Classification: A Class-Conditional VAE with Cycle-Consistent Decoder Refinement

We investigate whether a generative model can supply useful synthetic motor-imagery (MI) electroencephalography (EEG) trials that improve the accuracy of independent downstream classifiers. We train a class-conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with an integrated latent classifier on the Zhou motor-imagery dataset, using the learned per-class prior as a generator: sampling the prior for a given label and decoding it into a synthetic, label-consistent signal. A constraint on the covariance matrix of the generated data encourages preservation of covariance structure, and the model is trained with a schedule that alternates ordinary VAE training with a decoder-focused phase that sharpens the generative pathway used for augmentation. We measure the effect of adding synthetic trials to the training set under two evaluation protocols -- within-user (pooled 60/20/20 split across subjects) and cross-user (leave-one-subject-out, LOSO) -- across four representative EEG classification pipelines: Common Spatial Patterns with Linear Discriminant Analysis (CSP+LDA), tangent-space features with a Support Vector Machine (TGSP+SVM), Minimum Distance to Riemannian Mean (MDM), and a neural network based on EEGNetv4 (henceforth EEGNet). Results are aggregated across independent augmentation draws, random seeds (within-user), or leave-one-subject-out folds (cross-user), with uncertainty reported as 95% confidence intervals (Student's tt-distribution) computed over per-seed/per-fold averages. We find that synthetic EEG from the CVAE is most credible as a source of class-structured, covariance-like data rather than as a substitute for real raw EEG: it can raise the point estimate for MDM, but the broader augmentation claim remains conservative -- observed gains are small and classifier-dependent.
Matei Moldoveanu, Alain Sirois, Claire Ben Ali +2
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Visual Semantic Decoding of Electrocorticography from Video Stimuli using End-to-End Deep Learning

ECoG-based visual semantic decoding enables inference of semantic interpretation of visual perception from complex, noisy brain activity. This study examines the feasibility of visual semantic decoding using an end-to-end deep learning framework using electrocorticography (ECoG). Specifically, the decoding task is to predict visual categories from video stimuli using time-series neural inputs. A previously collected ECoG dataset from participants (n=17n=17) with drug-resistant epilepsy is used for analysis. With fewer than 50 training samples per visual category, this study evaluates multiple deep learning approaches, artificial neural network architectures, and frequency-band filtered inputs. The best-performing approach is analyzed to shed light on the discriminative information it relies on across spectral, temporal, and cortical dimensions. The selected decoding system uses mixup augmentation, a Transformer-based encoder, and high-gamma (80-150 Hz) inputs with a 900 ms post-stimulus window. Further analysis shows that early visual cortex (V2-V4), ventral stream visual cortex, MT+ complex with neighbouring visual areas, and lateral temporal cortex contributed substantially to decoding performance. This study demonstrates that an end-to-end deep learning framework can yield promising decoding performance from dynamic visual stimuli without handcrafted features, while the model behavior remains interpretable through spectral, temporal, and cortical dimensions, which are broadly consistent with established neuroscience knowledge.
Stella Ho, Joel Villalobos, Joseph West +7
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

AMICA-Python: Adaptive Mixture Independent Component Analysis with Anderson Acceleration

Adaptive Mixture Independent Component Analysis (AMICA) is widely used in EEG research and has long been associated with strong empirical performance for blind source separation. Despite its impact, practical use has historically depended on a single Fortran implementation, accessed via the EEGLAB toolbox for MATLAB, limiting its accessibility for analytical pipelines not designed within the MATLAB ecosystem. Here we present AMICA-Python, a Python implementation of the AMICA algorithm, with a scikit-learn-conformant API designed for integration with existing scientific Python pipelines. The implementation follows the reference algorithm closely while adopting modern software engineering practices and an interface familiar to Python users. Additionally, we introduce an optional Anderson acceleration scheme that can dramatically reduce the time to convergence for this relatively slow algorithm. To evaluate numerical agreement and practical performance, we benchmarked AMICA-Python against the reference Fortran implementation on 14 open EEG recordings. After averaging 3 runs of each implementation on all 14 recordings, AMICA-Python closely matched the reference, with a median final normalized log-likelihoods of 11.572 for both the Fortran and Python implementations, and a negligible median relative absolute difference of only 1.07×10−81.07\times10^{-8} when normalized by the absolute Fortran value. Runtime was also competitive. Relative to the reference implementation, AMICA-Python was 17.7% faster, while the Anderson-accelerated variant was 34.1% faster. AMICA-Python reproduces the reference implementation to high numerical precision with competitive runtime, while making AMICA available through a more accessible and extensible Python interface.
Scott Huberty, Christian O'Reilly
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Multi-Expert Graph Transformer for Interpretable EEG-Based Diagnostics

Electroencephalographic (EEG) abnormalities arise from dynamic changes in neural synchrony across spatial and temporal scales, yet many computational approaches reduce these dynamics to static features. We present a Spatial Multi-Expert Graph Transformer that models each EEG recording as a sequence of dynamic functional connectivity graphs. Time-resolved connectivity is estimated using the weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI), and hierarchical graph encoding aggregates information from electrode to regional and global levels. A multi-expert transformer architecture enables subtype-aware reasoning, with a gating mechanism adaptively fusing expert outputs for global abnormality prediction. Experiments on the TUAB dataset show competitive abnormal EEG detection performance and demonstrate the potential of dynamic graph modeling with adaptive expert fusion for interpretable, subtype-aware spatial--temporal analysis.
Maryam Rahimimovassagh, Md Elias Hossain, Ivan Garibay +1
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Differentiable Logic Gate Networks for Low-Latency EEG Classification on Edge Devices

Real-time EEG classification on edge devices is bottlenecked by the floating-point arithmetic of conventional neural networks. We investigated Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (Diff-Logic) as a hardware-native alternative that compiles models into pure Boolean circuits executable via bitwise CPU operations. Through rigorous iso-parameter experiments across four EEG datasets spanning two classification tasks, binary dementia detection and 3-class emotion recognition, we compared Diff-Logic against matched-capacity Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Binarized Neural Network (BNN) baselines at four complexity tiers (50k-500k parameters). On dementia screening, Diff-Logic achieved 80.2% Macro F1, outperforming the MLP baseline by 6.8%. On emotion recognition, the MLP retained a moderate performance advantage but incurred a 2.3×\times higher latency and 14×\times larger model size when deployed on a power-constrained (7W) Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano CPU (Single-core). Critically, Diff-Logic inference time remained nearly constant across a 10×\times increase in model scale, achieving a peak speedup of 2.9×\times over MLPs at the largest complexity tier. Our results establish logic-based neural architectures as a practical paradigm for resource-constrained brain-computer interfaces, achieving competitive or superior performance while natively satisfying the latency and memory constraints of portable edge deployment. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Shyamal-Dharia/eeg-difflogic
Shyamal Y. Dharia, Stephen D. Smith, Camilo E. Valderrama
Jul 20, 2026cs.SD

Addressing Limited Data in Auditory Attention Decoding with Diffusion Generative Models

Limited training data constrains deep learning models for Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) in hearing aids (HAs). AAD uses electroencephalogram (EEG) data to decode listener's attention, enabling real-time tracking of specific sound sources. However, achieving high AAD performance with short time windows typical in HAs (<=1s) is challenging due to the scarcity of real-world speech-evoked EEG data. To address this issue, we investigate diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) for generating synthetic speech-evoked EEG data. DPMs learn the underlying complex data structure through a denoising process and can generate realistic samples suitable for data augmentation. We evaluate the use of synthetic EEG data for augmenting datasets in locus-of-attention (LoA) classification tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that DPMs can generate realistic EEG signals and that incorporating synthetic data significantly improves AAD performance compared to models trained solely on measured EEG data (p<0.05). These results highlight the potential of diffusion-based data augmentation to mitigate training data limitations and improve the robustness of short-window AAD models in HA applications.
David Rannaleet, Victor Gunnarsson, Bo Bernhardsson +2
Jul 20, 2026eess.IV

FSDBN: Foreground-Aware EEG-Visual Alignment via Dynamic Brain Networks

EEG-based visual decoding provides a non-invasive pathway for interpreting visual semantics. However, existing methods often overlook the perceptual asymmetry between foreground and background in complex scenes, leading to background interference and semantic misalignment. EEG signals also exhibit rapid temporal dynamics and nonstationary spatial patterns, making it difficult to capture the time-varying brain connectivity associated with focal visual attention. To address these limitations, we propose FSDBN, a unified framework for robust EEG-visual decoding. FSDBN introduces Semantic-Consistent Saliency Alignment to separate semantically relevant foreground regions from background noise under joint saliency and semantic constraints. It further employs Semantic-Prior Dynamic Gating Foreground Fusion to adaptively regulate the contributions of foreground and background features. In parallel, EEG signals are modeled as adaptive spatiotemporal brain networks whose functional connectivity dynamically reorganizes to capture neural responses to salient foregrounds. Experiments on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval demonstrate that FSDBN achieves 69.0 percent top-1 accuracy and 92.2 percent top-5 accuracy, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LiuYiheng1/FSDBN-EEG.
Yiheng Liu, Chuhang Zheng, Peiliang Gong +3
Jul 17, 2026cs.CL

Encoding EEG Signals to Examine Human-Like Next-Word Prediction Behaviour in Language Models

Language models (LMs) are trained to excel at predicting the next word in the sequence given prior context, and humans also share this predictability in reading comprehension. Neuroscience research reveals that next-word predictability influences brain response, as recorded at millisecond resolution using electroencephalography (EEG). While our evidence indicates that advanced LMs achieve accuracies closely aligned with human performance at the next-word prediction task, this raises the question: Does higher prediction accuracy necessarily mean that these models adequately capture the cognitive signals associated with human reading comprehension? Here, we generate regressors for both humans and LMs based on two information measures, including top-1 prediction and surprisal, to predict event-related potential (ERP) elicited from EEG recordings which reflect different stages of cognitive processing during reading. We argue that modelling ERP patterns offers fine-grained analysis of the cognitive plausibility of various LMs during reading. Our results indicate that only surprisal potentially correlates with language-processing ERPs, especially for open-class words with high semantic content. Moreover, our findings challenge the assumption that scaling LMs with increased parameters and computational budgets will consistently lead to improved convergence with human-like linguistic processing.
Boi Mai Quach, Binh T. Nguyen, Cathal Gurrin +1
Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

Benchmarking MRI Representations for Deep Learning-Based Focal Cortical Dysplasia Segmentation

Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) is one of the leading structural causes of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, yet its subtle and heterogeneous imaging characteristics make accurate identification and delineation challenging on conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Although T1-weighted (T1w) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images are routinely acquired for presurgical evaluation, the contribution of different MRI representations to deep learning-based FCD segmentation remains poorly understood. In this study, we present a systematic benchmark of MRI representations for automated FCD segmentation using the nnU-Net framework. A publicly available presurgical MRI dataset comprising 85 FCD subjects and 25 healthy controls was used to evaluate eight input configurations, including conventional MRI contrasts (T1w and FLAIR), ratio-derived representations, and their multimodal combinations. To isolate the effect of MRI representation, all experiments employed identical preprocessing, network architecture, optimization strategy, and five-fold cross-validation. Among the evaluated single-modality representations, FLAIR achieved the strongest overall performance, whereas ratio-derived representations alone were insufficient for reliable identification of subtle FCD. Incorporating ratio-derived representations with conventional T1w and FLAIR images consistently improved lesion delineation, with the four-channel multimodal configuration achieving the highest overall Dice score (0.376), representing a 5.0% relative improvement over the conventional T1w+FLAIR representation. These findings demonstrate that MRI representation design is an important yet underexplored component of deep learning-based FCD segmentation and should be optimized alongside network architecture.
Soumen Ghosh, John Phamnguyen, Amit Soni Arya +3
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

An offline approach to fNIRS-guided reinforcement learning for robot behavior

Human-in-the-loop Reinforcement Learning has become a popular approach to training, finetuning, and aligning robot behavior with user preferences. Our paper explores the feasibility of using brain signals via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to modulate robot learning in simulation. We compare agents trained on passive (observational) versus active (demonstrative) interaction tasks, and test multiple methods for enhancing the RL algorithm with the neural signal, focusing on parameter augmentation rather than replacement. We further examine how model granularity and noise affect agent learning. Our results show that this framework is effective: the neural signal improves learning when augmenting trajectory priorities and state-action q-values. Additionally, the framework learns successfully from offline data, offering a practical alternative for settings where real-time BCI setups are impractical or only limited data is available.
Julia Santaniello, Madelaine Brower, Benson Jiang +3
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

NeuroGRIP: Retrieval-Augmented Graph Refinement for Knowledge-Grounded EEG Seizure Diagnosis

Seizure diagnosis from EEG signals is a critical yet persistently challenging task, due to the complicated neural dynamics and the spurious connections in inter-channel modeling. While spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have advanced EEG brain network representation learning, the resulting graph structures suffer from low clinical plausibility and limited interpretability due to their purely data-driven nature. To this end, we introduce NeuroGRIP, a retrieval-augmented graph refinement framework that incorporates external medical knowledge to calibrate noisy EEG graphs. We first construct a large-scale, domain-specific knowledge base derived from authoritative clinical guidelines. Leveraging large language models, we extract structured biomedical entities and relations to form a textual knowledge graph (KG), which serves as external knowledge source of clinical priors. Our framework performs alignment-aware query construction by projecting STGNN-generated EEG node embeddings into the semantic space of KG. Semantic queries are then executed via FAISS-based similarity search over knowledge triplets to retrieve relation evidence. Each predicted edge is assigned a confidence score based on retrieved similarity, relation type, and source reliability, enabling us to prune medically implausible edges from the originally predicted graph. Extensive experiments on TUSZ and CHB-MIT demonstrate that NeuroGRIP not only improves seizure detection accuracy but also enhances interpretability by grounding each prediction in clinically validated knowledge. This work provides the first unified framework that tightly couples brain dynamics with external medical expertise via retrieval-augmented reasoning, paving the way for knowledge-enhanced, explainable clinical diagnosis. The code is available at: https://github.com/LincanLi-X/NeuroGRIP.
Lincan Li, Zheng Chen, Yushun Dong
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

Leveraging unlabelled data for generalizable neural population decoding

Robust and accurate neural decoders are integral to neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces and closed-loop experiments. Recent work has shown that tokenizing neural data at the spike level facilitates multi-session pretraining and delivers state-of-the-art decoding performance. However, current spike-based models are restricted to supervised learning (SL), limiting training to datasets with paired behavioural labels. To address this limitation, we introduce MOJO (Masked autOencoder-based JOint training), a training framework for spike-tokenizing models that jointly leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) via masked autoencoding and SL objectives. We evaluate MOJO on three spiking datasets spanning monkey motor cortex during reaching tasks and multi-regional mouse recordings during vision and decision making tasks, demonstrating superior performance over purely SL-trained models. This improvement is especially pronounced when training with limited labelled data, particularly in few-shot finetuning, where only a small amount of labelled data from a new session is available. Incorporating SSL also yields more interpretable neuronal representations, improving performance on brain region classification and spike-statistics prediction without explicit optimization for these tasks. We further show that MOJO generalizes beyond spiking data to human electrocorticography during speech, where it continues to outperform purely SL-trained models and achieves performance comparable to neuro-foundation models (NFMs) designed specifically for continuous signals. Overall, augmenting spike-tokenizing models with SSL improves performance in label-impoverished settings and enables the use of unlabelled data across various tasks and species, while generalizing to other neural modalities. These results suggest a path towards more flexible and scalable data usage when training NFMs.
Ximeng Mao, Nanda H. Krishna, Avery Hee-Woon Ryoo +2
Jul 14, 2026cs.AR

A 32-channel event-based bio-signal analog front-end with adaptive delta and pulse frequency encoding

Low-power event-based Analog Front-Ends (AFEs) are essential for building efficient, end-to-end neuromorphic signal processing systems. In this paper, we present an event-based AFE Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) optimized for biomedical signal acquisition and encoding. The chip features 32 independently programmable input channels with dual-mode encoding mechanism outputs, comprising Pulse Frequency Modulation (PFM) and adaptive Asynchronous Delta Modulator (aADM) circuits. The aADM encoder provides an auto-scaling mechanism that adapts the encoding data-rate based on the input signal envelope in real-time, enabling very high data compression for low-power information transmission. This approach paves the way toward adaptive wireless communication of neural signals for on-line processing in brain-computer interfaces. Fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process, the proposed ASIC offers a highly configurable interface compatible with state-of-the-art Spiking Neural Network (SNN) neuromorphic processors.
Narayanan Shyam, Saptarshi Ghosh, Giacomo Indiveri
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

The Capacity of Thought: Benchmarking Llama 3.2 in Semantic fMRI Neural Language Decoding and Improving the Huth Encoding-Model Baseline

Decoding continuous language from fMRI signals remains a core challenge in non-invasive brain-computer interface research. We present two complementary investigations. First, we improve the Huth et al. ridge regression encoding pipeline through expanded voxel selection (10K->15K), substitution of GPT-2 medium for GPT-1 as the beam-search proposal model, and GPU-accelerated bootstrap training, achieving mean METEOR = 0.149 and BLEU-1 = 0.200 across three held-out narratives for subject UTS03 -- an 11% relative METEOR gain over our replication baseline. Second, we introduce fMRIFlamingo, which maps BOLD activity to a frozen Llama-3.2-1B with trainable gated cross-attention layers via a learned brain tokenizer and a Perceiver Resampler. Despite achieving 42.86% Top-1 accuracy on a 1-in-100 ranking task, well above chance, a blind control ablation with zeroed fMRI inputs yields near-identical scores, revealing that apparent decoding success is driven primarily by the frozen language prior rather than by neural input. These results demonstrate that high-capacity language models do not inherently improve fMRI decoding and can actively obscure failures without rigorous blind-control evaluation.
Milos Suvakovic, Dom Marhoefer, Glenn Grant-Richards +1
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Parallel Tracking: Interactive Multi-Feature Fusion Drives Semantic Reconstruction from Non-invasive Brain Recordings

Continuous semantic reconstruction from non-invasive neural recordings remains limited by the representational mismatch between semantic feature spaces and neural coding patterns, which severely impedes cross-modal alignment between high-noise neural signals and target semantic features. Prior semantic decoders have predominantly relied on static lexical representations or dynamic contextualized representations in isolation. This single-dimension approach inevitably leads to severe information loss, as it fails to account for the human brain's capacity to integrate stable word attributes and dynamic contexts simultaneously.To bridge this gap, this study introduces a multi-feature fusion framework for non-invasive semantic reconstruction, systematically benchmarking two integration approaches: linear Naive Concatenation and non-linear Multi-Head Cross-Attention. Within this framework, our approach complements static lexical representations (W2V) with dynamic contextual representations (GPT) via an interactive gating mechanism to facilitate cooperative processing during language comprehension.Evaluated through extensive semantic reconstruction and text generation experiments, our framework reveals a robust performance hierarchy: Cross-Att > Concat > GPT > W2V. Crucially, the non-linear cross-attention fusion method achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating that neural language decoding benefits from simulating the collaborative modulation between contextual information and core lexical attributes rather than depending on isolated individual features, while also offering a viable non-invasive brain-to-text decoding method.
Boda Xiao, Xiran Xu, Songyi Li +4
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

DiffEEG: A Self-Supervised Denoising Diffusion Model for Learning EEG Generic Representations

Deep learning for EEG-based seizure detection faces critical challenges: severe annotation scarcity and extreme class imbalance, where ictal events comprise less than 10% of clinical recordings. We present DiffEEG, a 9.6M-parameter self-supervised foundation model that addresses both limitations through denoising diffusion pre-training and reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning. Pre-trained on 1.3M unlabeled segments from the Temple University Hospital Seizure Corpus (TUHSZ), DiffEEG learns generic neural representations via a 1D U-Net with multi-head self-attention. For downstream adaptation, a reinforced decision layer employs policy gradient optimization to directly maximize F1-score, prioritizing sensitivity to rare seizure events over overall accuracy. Under strict patient-wise evaluation (279 patients, Leave-One-Fold-Out), DiffEEG achieves 61% accuracy and 59% F1 for 4-class seizure subtyping, and 81% accuracy with 85% weighted F1 for binary detection, maintaining clinically viable seizure recall (59%) despite extreme imbalance (6.7% prevalence). Segment-level evaluation establishes an upper bound of 97.6% accuracy, confirming strong architectural capacity. DiffEEG demonstrates that diffusion-based pre-training combined with metric-aware reinforcement learning enables clinically deployable seizure monitoring with minimal labeled data requirements.
Abdulkader Helwan, Lina Abou-Abbas, Hussein El Amouri +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

Learning Residual Kinematic Corrections for Continuous Neural Decoding via Reinforcement Learning

Decoding continuous three-dimensional (3D) motor imagery (MI) using non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain--computer interfaces (BCIs) remains challenging due to signal variability and residual decoding errors. Deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural network--long short-term memory (CNN--LSTM) models can capture spatial and temporal dynamics for continuous kinematic decoding; however, systematic residual errors persist in predicted trajectories. We propose a two-stage decoding framework that applies reinforcement learning (RL) to perform residual kinematic correction on the outputs of a CNN--LSTM decoder (CNN--LSTM--RL). The RL agent is trained offline without direct EEG input and instead operates on predicted kinematic trajectories to optimize movement accuracy relative to target trajectories. Decoding performance was quantified using Pearson correlation coefficients (rr) and Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) along the x,yx, y, and zz axes. Compared to CNN--LSTM applied alone, CNN--LSTM--RL improved the mean correlation from 0.50760.5076 to 0.71810.7181 (p=0.0005p = 0.0005) in 2D and from 0.64200.6420 to 0.77800.7780 (p=0.0059p = 0.0059) in VR, with relative gains of 41.5%41.5\% and 21.2%21.2\%, respectively. Correspondingly, RMSE was reduced from 0.08900.0890 to 0.05320.0532 (2D, p<0.0001p < 0.0001) and from 0.07140.0714 to 0.04410.0441 (VR, p<0.0001p < 0.0001), representing relative reductions of 40.2%40.2\% and 38.2%38.2\%. These findings demonstrate that this scalable framework enhances 3D BCI MI decoding by correcting kinematic errors via offline residual RL without extra neural data, advancing neurorehabilitation, prosthetics, and virtual interaction.
Jiamian Li, Niall McShane, Attila Korik +6
Jul 11, 2026q-bio.NC

Learning the Brain's Dynamics as a Port-Hamiltonian System

We model human motor cortex during a wrist-extension BCI task as a port-Hamiltonian system (pHS): a conservative interconnection (gyroscopic coupling between neural phasors) plus a dissipative port (power-law energy decay driven by a GNN surrogate). A metriplectic integrator evolves the phasor state; a Fluctuation--Dissipation-consistent noise channel produces stochastic trajectories at body temperature. Training on \FitTrainN\ real EEG cycles (PhysioNet EEGMMIDB, 3 held-out subjects) reaches a test MSE of \FitTestMSE\ and passes three scale-free criticality rungs: near-critical branching ratio (σ≈1σ\approx1), 1/f1/f power-law spectrum, and long-range DFA correlations. The model generates closed-loop neuromodulation signals that restore phase-locking in silico when applied to de-synchronised inputs, suggesting a path toward structure-preserving BCI decoders.
Dibakar Sigdel
Jul 10, 2026q-bio.NC

PHINN-EEG: Topological Time-Series Analysis of Dream-State EEG -- Dynamic Betti Curves for Dream Content Classification and Topology-Conditioned Neural Signal Synthesis

Current electroencephalography (EEG)-based dream detection relies on power spectral density (PSD) and statistical moment features, achieving a state-of-the-art area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of approximately 0.70 on the DREAM database (Wong et al., 2025, Nature Communications). We introduce PHINN-EEG (Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for EEG), the first topological time-series framework for dream mentation analysis. Using sliding-window Takens delay embeddings and Vietoris-Rips filtrations on multichannel pre-awakening EEG epochs, we extract Dynamic Betti Curves that characterize the geometric architecture of neural activity, not merely its energy. These topological invariants, combined with topology-conditioned flow matching, are analytically projected to outperform existing PSD and catch22 benchmarks, targeting AUC = 0.82-0.90 on the 1,462-awakening open-access subset of the DREAM database (drawn from a full registry of 3,191 total awakenings from 263 participants across 20 independent laboratories). We further introduce a topology-conditioned rectified flow model for dream-state EEG synthesis-with a spectral-conditioned flow model of comparable feature dimensionality as an additional ablation baseline to isolate the value of topological conditioning specifically-and propose a set of candidate Betti transition archetypes linking topology to phenomenological dream report categories, presented as an exploratory hypothesis space pending empirical validation. If validated, this work represents a paradigm shift from spectral energy to phase-space geometry in neural rare-event detection, with potential future implications for wearable BCI dream monitoring.
Ren Takahashi, Emre Yusuf, Jayabrata Bhaduri
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

CoCoT-EEG: Contrastive-Pretrained Multiscale Convolutional Transformer for EEG Decoding

Self-supervised pretrained foundation models (FM) have shown early promise for non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding applications. Many recent large-scale models converged on the approach of tokenizing raw EEG followed by masked reconstruction pretraining. However, this recipe has been shown to be suboptimal for data, like EEG, with high noise amplitude and information confined to limited dimensions such as narrow frequency bands. Building on this insight, we develop a novel contrastive-pretrained EEG model with multiscale temporal convolution input layers and Transformer encoder blocks (CoCoT). CoCoT matches or beats state-of-the-art reconstruction-pretrained EEG models on extensive benchmark decoding tasks with heterogeneous electrode configurations. Furthermore, CoCoT trained from scratch outperforms previous single-task decoding models and even rivals pretrained models, showcasing the architecture's flexibility and data efficiency. Through systematic ablations, including model architecture and pretraining objective, we demonstrate the viability of contrastive learning for building EEG FMs while suggesting key architectural design considerations, prompting further investigations in alternative large-scale pretraining strategies.
Gabriel Mahuas, Victoria Shevchenko, Ugo Tanielian +2
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

When Certificates Fail: A Unified Safety Framework for Embedded Neural Interface Models

Formal robustness certificates for embedded neural-interface models can pass while task accuracy collapses: at perturbation budget e=0.25, EEGNet classification accuracy drops by 25.7% under projected-gradient attack while the Lipschitz-style certificate remains valid for all 9 tested subjects. We argue that this gap between mathematical certification and operational safety is one instance of a broader alignment failure in neural interfaces, where training objectives diverge from user welfare. We propose a unified empirical audit framework organized around three such failures: verification insufficiency, in which certificates pass while task behavior degrades; proxy-fidelity divergence, in which task-optimized representations damage neural signal structure (a time-domain auxiliary objective reduces reconstruction MSE by 0.1132 while worsening spectral log-MSE); and latent information exfiltration, in which public-task embeddings retain private attributes (subject identity recoverable at 48.1% versus 6.7% chance). We instantiate the framework on BCI Competition IV 2a and SEED-IV using multiple deep and classical EEG decoders, official session-level validation, null controls, and paired statistical tests. The verification gap persists across EEGNet, CSP+LDA, and FBCSP+LDA, and is therefore architecture-independent. Our results establish that operational safety auditing, not certificate verification alone, is necessary for responsible neural-interface deployment.
Jasmeet Singh Bindra
Jul 6, 2026eess.SP

DBNN: Neural Spike Classification Using a Deep Binarized Neural Network

Implantable brain-computer interfaces require on-node spike sorting to reduce telemetry bandwidth and power while maintaining reliable neural decoding. This paper presents a hardware-oriented deep binarized neural network (DBNN) spike-sorting system with two binarized hidden layers with 256 neurons and a fixed-point output layer to enable multiplier-free inference dominated by sign-controlled accumulation and bit-wise logic. The proposed classifier operates on compact 16-sample spike waveforms to reduce the implementation cost (16-256-256-3) and achieves a median classification accuracy of 98.7% on both synthetic and in-vivo datasets. An FPGA prototype on a Cyclone V device operates at 50 MHz and requires 528 cycles per spike, corresponding to a 0.01 ms compute latency, while consuming 828 ALMs and 1023 registers with zero DSP blocks. For ASIC feasibility, the DBNN is implemented using FreePDK45-based flow; synthesis in Synopsys Design Compiler indicates an estimated silicon area of 0.014 mm2 and an operating power of 122 nW at 20 kHz under a 1.1 V supply. These results demonstrate that the proposed DBNN spike sorter offers a favorable trade-off between accuracy and implementation cost, supporting low-power, implantable neural interfaces. Overall, the proposed DBNN spike sorter achieves high accuracy (98.7%) with extremely low hardware cost (0.014 mm2, 122 nW at 20 kHz) and multiplier-free operation, making it suitable for low-power, implantable neural interfaces. This paper introduces the first DBNN designed for real-time neural spike sorting, striking an excellent balance between input data size and network complexity.
Binyi Ren, Luca M. Meyer, Majid Zamani
Jul 6, 2026cs.LG

Lightweight ML-Based Automatic Sleep Staging Framework with Constrained CNN and Mamba for Small-Sample EEG Datasets

Automatic sleep staging is a key technology for precise diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders as well as long-term home sleep monitoring. Portable electroencephalogram (EEG) devices have become the focus of research due to their convenience in data collection. However, current methods still face three major challenges: large parameter sizes that easily lead to overfitting on small datasets, low accuracy in classifying difficult stages such as N1 and REM, unclear optimal training dataset size, and difficulty in deployment. This paper proposes GamSleepNet, a lightweight and low-latency automatic sleep staging framework for single-channel EEG. The framework features the FEB module, which combines improved Gabor kernels with learnable filters for feature extraction, uses the Mamba architecture to build a temporal classification network, introduces a novel contrastive loss and a two-stage training strategy, and experimentally validates the optimal dataset size for single-channel EEG sleep staging models. On the Sleepedf dataset, this model achieves an overall accuracy of 87.86 percent with only 30.86 thousand parameters, with all metrics reaching SOTA levels and significantly improving the identification accuracy of challenging sleep stages.
Zihao Wei, Yulin Gong, Yudan Lv
Jul 6, 2026cs.CL

EEG-SpikeAgent: Agentic Closed-Loop Program Synthesis for Automated EEG Spike Detection

Automated detection of interictal epileptiform discharges in scalp electroencephalography (EEG) is clinically important, but recent high-performing deep-learning models often trade interpretability for accuracy. We introduce EEG-SpikeAgent, a closed-loop program-synthesis framework that uses a large language model (LLM) agentic system to generate signal-processing features for spike detection in scalp EEG. The system iteratively proposes one deterministic EEG feature module at a time, executes the resulting code on EEG to generate tabular features, evaluates performance via a tabular classifier, summarizes run-level metrics, and feeds structured diagnostics back to the model for refinement. Across iterations, EEG-SpikeAgent proposes and refines candidate signal features and decision rules informed by model performance. We evaluated EEG-SpikeAgent on VEPISET, a public 29-channel dataset of 4-second epochs containing 2,516 discharge-containing and 22,933 non-discharge epochs. Across five-fold cross-validation with a gradient-boosted tree classifier, agent-generated features achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.935, balanced accuracy of 0.699, F1 score of 0.557, sensitivity of 0.401, and specificity of 0.996 at the default operating point. At an operating point with sensitivity 0.80, mean precision was 0.470 and mean specificity was 0.900. Artifact-aware feature generation improved balanced accuracy and F1 score over spike-only feature search. These results indicate that LLM-based program synthesis can automate EEG feature engineering in auditable and inspectable code-driven manner for clinical and methodological review.
Sonali Santhosh, Kelly Shuhong Yu, Eugene Chang +3
Jul 5, 2026cs.AR

Neuromorphic Silicon Neuron Controller for Adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) affects millions worldwide and causes severe motor symptoms. Adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) delivers physiologically informed stimulation that can track fluctuations in PD motor symptoms, enabling more intelligent DBS control. However, most existing aDBS approaches are primarily algorithm- and software-driven, with limited efforts toward circuit realization, particularly low-power and implantable integrated circuits. This paper presents the Silicon Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Deep Brain Stimulation (SiLIF-DBS) controller, a neuromorphic silicon neuron stimulator implemented with metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. For system-level evaluation, a simplified computational model of the SiLIF-DBS controller is derived and embedded within a Parkinsonian cortico-basal ganglia framework for closed-loop validation. The system is driven by beta-band subthalamic nucleus local field potentials (STN-LFPs), with their average rectified value (Beta ARV) used as the control biomarker. Our SiLIF-DBS controller for aDBS suppresses pathological beta activity while consuming only 25% of the power required by open-loop stimulation and achieving a suppression efficiency of 5.85%5.85\%/μμW. Overall, our SiLIF-DBS controller achieves strong beta suppression at substantially reduced power, delivering high suppression efficiency that demonstrates it is a viable foundation for low-power implantable aDBS.
Md Abu Bakr Siddique, Jakub Orłowski, Yan Zhang +1
Jul 4, 2026cs.LG

NeuroOnline: Bridging Pretraining and Online Adaptation for EEG Foundation Models

EEG foundation models have shown strong potential in learning generalized representations across subjects and tasks. However, most existing approaches follow a pretraining-static deployment paradigm, which suffers from two key limitations: (1) misalignment between pretraining objectives and downstream tasks, and (2) limited adaptability to distribution shifts in online settings. We propose Online Neural Adaptation (NeuroOnline), a unified framework that enables continuous adaptation in online scenarios. NeuroOnline integrates two complementary mechanisms: (1) multi-view consistency learning, which enforces cross-view alignment to promote consistent and task-relevant representations, and (2) context-aware representation modulation, which leverages a learnable context prompt with cross-attention to dynamically adapt representations to evolving data distributions. Together, these mechanisms unify representation alignment and dynamic adaptation. Experiments on multiple EEG benchmarks show that NeuroOnline consistently outperforms strong baselines in online settings, achieving better performance under distribution shifts. Ablation and sensitivity studies further validate the necessity of each component and the effectiveness of the overall design.
Weibin Li, Wendu Li, Yushan You +2
Jul 4, 2026cs.LG

Omni-Sleep: A Sleep Foundation Model via Hierarchical Contrastive Learning of CNS-ANS Dynamics

Sleep physiology arises from the coordinated dynamics of the central nervous system (CNS) and autonomic nervous system (ANS), as reflected by multimodal polysomnography signals including EEG, EOG, EMG, ECG, and respiration. However, existing sleep foundation models often fuse heterogeneous biosignals in a topology-agnostic manner, overlooking their physiological organization. We introduce Omni-Sleep, a sleep foundation model that uses the CNS/ANS partition as a physiological prior for topology-constrained representation learning. Omni-Sleep learns structured representations through three objectives: intra-system consistency, which captures shared subsystem-level factors within neural and cardio-respiratory signals; inter-system synchronization, which aligns subsystem trajectories to model brain--body dynamics; and latent-space masked temporal modeling, which captures long-horizon sleep dynamics. Pre-trained on over 100,000 hours of multi-center multimodal PSG data, Omni-Sleep is evaluated on sleep staging and multi-disease classification. Across datasets and modality-ablation settings, Omni-Sleep outperforms strong foundation-model baselines, showing improved label efficiency, cross-dataset generalization, and robustness to missing modalities. These results highlight the value of physiological hierarchy for generalizable sleep representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/AutoBrain-sleep/OmniSleep.
Zhoujie Hou, Song Wang, Kexin Lou +3
Jul 4, 2026cs.SD

EEG-Based Imagined Speech Decoding Using a Hybrid CNN-SNN Architecture

Imagined speech decoding using EEG signals has emerged as a promising frontier in brain-computer interface (BCI) research, particularly to restore communication for individuals with severe speech impairments. However, decoding imagined speech remains a complex task due to the non-stationary, low-amplitude, and highly variable nature of EEG signals. Existing methods often rely on classical machine learning or deep learning models that fail to exploit spike-based temporal dynamics or event-driven firing mechanisms of biological neurons, which are naturally modeled by spiking neural networks (SNNs). In this study, we propose a hybrid decoding pipeline that extracts temporal representations using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) followed by biologically inspired temporal classification via SNNs. To our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate SNNs into EEG-based imagined speech decoding. Experimental results show that the proposed CNN-SNN architecture achieves an accuracy of 80.13% on the 2020 BCI Competition III benchmark, surpassing existing methods reported in the literature (up to 70.19%) under comparable evaluation settings. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of spike-based temporal decoding for imagined speech, highlighting the promise of biologically grounded pipelines for next generation neuromorphic BCI applications.
Fatima Shalhoub, Mariam Al Mawla, Kabalan Chaccour +2
Jul 3, 2026cs.LG

Stacked LoRA for Subject-Adaptive EEG Foundation Models in Motor Imagery Decoding

Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) faces a major challenge: substantial inter-subject variability limits effective cross-subject generalization. Consequently, practical systems still rely largely on subject-specific models trained from scratch and requiring individual recalibration. EEG foundation models have recently emerged as a promising alternative; however, even large pretrained models cannot simply be used as fixed feature extractors and still require additional adaptation before they can be reliably applied to downstream tasks. In this work, we address this challenge through targeted adaptation strategies. Building on recent EEG foundation models such as REVE, LaBraM, and LUNA, we examine the impact of different low-rank adaptation strategies on motor imagery classification. We propose a framework that structurally decouples subject-invariant knowledge from subject-specific neural signatures: the low-rank update at each adapted layer is split into a Global adapter, trained jointly across all subjects, and Subject-Specific adapters, each absorbing individual variability. To assess the contribution of each path, we compare three adaptation strategies: (i) subject-specific LoRA (ii) global LoRA and (iii) stacked LoRA, combining both Global and Subject Specific adapters. Experiments on BCI Competition IV-2a, PhysioNet Motor Imagery, and the clinical Zuo2025 benchmark show that Stacked LoRA effectively mitigates inter-subject variability, achieving the best accuracy in the large majority of backbone and dataset combinations. Our analysis further reveals that the optimal balance between the global and subject-specific paths depends on the target population: a shared adapter is sufficient for large, diverse cohorts, whereas subject-specific adaptation is decisive under the high inter-session variability of clinical recordings.
Aymen Sarhane, Fouad Lbakali, Mouad Souissi +2
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

A Granularity-Aware EEG Feature Framework for Psychopathology Dimension Prediction

Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a noninvasive approach for examining neurophysiological correlates of dimensional psychopathology, yet systematic evidence across EEG paradigms and feature granularities remains limited. Here, we develop a granularity-aware EEG feature pipeline that organizes multi-scale descriptors into global, regional, and channel levels. Using the Healthy Brain Network (HBN) cohort, we evaluate the prediction of four psychopathology dimensions: p-factor, internalizing, externalizing, and attention problems, across four EEG paradigms. Given the heterogeneity of pediatric psychopathology and the moderate reliability of questionnaire-derived scores, this setting represents a challenging feasibility test rather than a clinical screening scenario. Tree-based models and granularity-balanced feature selection showed promising improvements over conventional approaches in selected conditions, although effect sizes remained modest. Visualization of selected markers revealed dimension-specific spatial and spectral patterns that were broadly aligned with existing neurophysiological knowledge. An exploratory cross-dataset sanity check on the independent PEARL cohort suggested that the proposed selection principle remains technically feasible under protocol shifts, without claiming cross-dataset generalizability. Overall, multi-scale EEG features contain weak but detectable signals related to dimensional psychopathology, and granularity-aware selection may serve as a useful feature-reduction strategy for future EEG-based phenotyping studies.
Haofan Cheng, Jingjing Hu, Jingrong Pei +6
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Single-Channel EEG-Based Cognitive Load Assessment in Online Learning: A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach

Monitoring cognitive load during online learning could help instructors identify content that learners find difficult, but remote settings remove the visual cues that support this judgement in a classroom. We study whether a single-channel, consumer-grade EEG device (the NeuroSky MindWave Mobile 2) can distinguish easy from difficult educational-video content, using the publicly available dataset of Wang et al. [24] (ten learners, one excluded for excessive noise, leaving nine). We implement a hybrid CNN+LSTM+Attention model that combines the raw waveform with band-power features. In a within-subject setting, the model reaches up to 78.5% accuracy, compared with 55% for conventional feature-based classifiers; regularization (dropout and L2) closes the large gap between training and validation accuracy that we observe without it, keeping validation accuracy stable at roughly 68-73%. We are deliberately cautious about these numbers: with only nine subjects, within-subject evaluation is optimistic, and we argue that subject-independent evaluation -- in which no learner appears in both training and test data -- should be the standard for this task. To that end we release a reproducible evaluation pipeline. We frame the work as a feasibility study rather than a deployable system, and pair it with an open, notebook-based tool that records EEG, runs inference, and visualizes estimated cognitive load as a heatmap over the video timeline to help educators locate potentially challenging segments.
Rowan Hussein, Mohamed Ouf
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Which Metric Reflects the Spelling Rate Accuracy in Event-Related Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces?

For predictive models, the often-reported performance metrics are the loss and accuracy. In synchronous Brain- Computer Interface (BCI) systems, these metrics are informative for most BCI paradigms; however, for Event-Related Potential (ERP) applications the spelling rate, which measures the number of characters correctly selected is more important as it influences the estimation of information transfer rate (ITR) and any related metric measuring spelling performance. Moreover, ERP-based BCIs hold imbalanced data class distributions, which require reporting metrics that can handle the imbalance, such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC). In this work, we study the correlation of the spelling rate with 13 metrics to identify which among them best reflect user spelling performance and how they are affected by trial repetition. The Results of two datasets (a private LARESI ERP dataset and the public OpenBMI ERP dataset) favor the Brier score, Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC), and the metrics that account for class imbalance in binary classification: ROC AUC, area under the Precision-Recall curve (PR AUC), Average Precision (AP), and partial AUC (pAUC). These findings encourage researchers and practitioners to report those metrics in ERP-based BCI experiments.
Okba Bekhelifi, Naoual El Djouher Mebtouche
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Teaching LLMs to Recommend and Defer in Underrepresented Epilepsy Care

Specialist epilepsy expertise is scarce in resource-constrained settings, making LLM-based decision support attractive for frontline clinicians managing longitudinal treatment. Such systems must adapt to local prescribing practice and know when to defer. We study this problem in Ugandan pediatric epilepsy care, predicting anti-seizure medication regimens from longitudinal unstructured clinic notes. Standard prompting achieves non-trivial agreement with physician prescriptions, but neurologist review shows that many errors reflect distribution-miscalibrated prescribing defaults rather than failures to parse the local record. We introduce MANANA, a non-parametric prompt-learning framework that learns local prescribing guidance from a small patient-level training set. MANANA converts observed prescription errors into auditable prompt memories, instantiated in single-agent and multi-agent variants, and improves over classical ML models, direct LLM prompting, and prompt-optimization baselines across two independently collected Ugandan cohorts. We further propose Bayesian prompt averaging, which converts the learned prompt trajectory into prescription likelihoods and an uncertainty-based deferral signal. On the independently collected held-out cohort, this improves visit-level top-3 prescription accuracy by 4-8 percentage points over prompt-optimization baselines and enables selective prediction: the system can auto-handle the most confident half of cases at 95% precision, or the most confident quarter at 99% precision, while deferring lower-confidence cases for specialist review.
Shreyas Rajesh, Kartik Sharma, Tonmoy Monsoor +8
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

Temporal Feature Extractors in EEG Foundation Models: A Controlled Comparison Including a Pretrained Time-Series Model

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models aim to learn generalizable representations from large-scale brain recordings. However, the role of temporal feature extractors and whether pretrained time-series foundation models (TSFMs) can be effectively transferred to this setting remains underexplored. We conduct a controlled comparison of three temporal feature extraction strategies, including a linear baseline, a convolutional encoder, and a frozen pretrained TSFM (MOMENT), within a unified EEG foundation model. We evaluate their impact on representation quality using two downstream tasks: motor imagery and emotion recognition. Results reveal different trends across the evaluated benchmarks. On the motor imagery dataset, simple temporal representations perform competitively, whereas the emotion dataset benefits from richer temporal modeling. Although not specifically adapted to EEG, the pretrained TSFM serves as an effective temporal feature extractor, suggesting that general-purpose time-series representations can be transferred as frozen temporal feature extractors within EEG foundation models.
Ayşe Betül Yüce, Chris Joey Leffler, Sarun Varghese +2
Jun 26, 2026cs.NE

Neuromorphic Energy-Aware Learning for Adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation

Neuromorphic and edge computing research has focused on reducing the inference cost of neural network controllers, yet in physical closed-loop systems the actuator can rival or exceed an efficient controller in energy. An efficient controller is therefore necessary but not sufficient, because the actuator becomes the cost worth reducing once inference no longer dominates it. Here, we introduce energy-aware learning, an approach that incorporates actuator energy directly into the reinforcement learning reward, and demonstrate it in closed-loop deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease. A deep spiking Q-network, trained in a biophysical cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuit model, learns to suppress pathological alpha-beta oscillations by 45.2% while reducing stimulation charge by 80.0% relative to continuous DBS. Sparsity-constrained knowledge distillation compresses the policy onto the SynSense XyloAudio 3 neuromorphic processor at 0.52 mW inference power, yielding 28.1x lower energy per inference than an equivalent artificial neural network on conventional edge hardware. By co-optimizing stimulation energy and inference efficiency, the framework addresses both major power demands in implantable neuromodulation.
Binh Nguyen, Colleen Josephson, Mircea Teodorescu +2
Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

What the LLM Should Not Say: Boundary-Aware Context Grounding for A Seven-Channel EEG Agent

Large language models (LLMs) can make scientific software easier to use. However, a general model does not automatically know which measurements a particular sensor can support, which algorithms are implemented in the current software, or which conclusions are justified by a computed result. These distinctions are especially important for low-channel electroencephalography (EEG), where sparse spatial coverage and variable signal quality make plausible but unsupported interpretations easy to produce. We present NeuraDock Agent, an open-source architecture that separates a deterministic local EEG engine from a hardware-aware language layer. The numerical engine parses recordings, performs quality control, executes reviewed spectral workflows, and writes machine-readable artifacts. The LLM receives only a compact, allowlisted summary and a versioned context pack. The context describes the seven-channel hardware, reviewed workflows, result fields, implementation boundaries, scientific limits, and reference cases. Raw EEG and dense per-sample arrays remain local We evaluate the system at three levels. First, 12 recordings produced identical structured results over ten numerical repetitions, and a complete Rest/Task run produced identical result, report, and figure hashes over three repetitions. Second, request-capture and failure-injection experiments confirmed the tested data boundary and preservation of local artifacts under HTTP, malformed-output, and connection failures. Third, a boundary-awareness benchmark tested 36 ordinary and adversarial questions under four context ablations and two LLMs, yielding 288 outputs.These results support hardware- and implementation-aware grounding as a practical mechanism for calibrating what an EEG agent accepts, qualifies, or refuses; they do not establish clinical validity or a validated absolute cognitive-load index.
Zhiyuan Xu, Yueqing Dai, Junling Li +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

NeuraDock Visual Cognitive Load Agent Tutorial: A Quality-Gated Open-Source EEG Workflow for Alpha Dynamics and Real-Time Applications

This tutorial paper provides a step-by-step, reproducible walkthrough of NeuraDock Agent, an open-source EEG agent focused on Alpha dynamics and visual cognitive-load analysis. The goal is practical: a reader should be able to install the agent, run EEG preprocessing and quality control, generate Alpha dynamics figures, perform within-subject Rest/Task visual cognitive-load comparison, run the public mini-dataset analyses and compare them with the reference validation summary, start an online dashboard, call the real-time API from an external application, and use the LLM interpretation layer to explain quality risks. Existing EEG toolkits provide excellent offline analysis, but assembling a real-time, quality-gated cognitive-load pipeline often requires manually bridging acquisition, custom QC, Alpha feature extraction, and a web API; this tutorial closes that offline-to-online gap. The tutorial uses a quality-gated workflow: downstream Alpha and workload metrics are computed only after preprocessing and QC gating rather than directly from raw EEG. In the included mini-dataset validation, the agent processed 18 recordings, generated 10 within-subject comparisons, observed task-related posterior Alpha suppression in 7 of 10 contrasts, estimated initial evidence of within-subject repeatability, and benchmarked local online API latency. The tutorial is intended for researchers, developers, and applied teams who want a transparent path from EEG files to real-time visual cognitive-load prototypes.
Zhiyuan Xu, Yueqing Dai, Junling Li +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

Utilizing Cognitive Signals Generated during Human Reading to Enhance Keyphrase Extraction from Microblogs

Microblogging platforms generate massive amounts of short, noisy, and dispersed user content, making automatic keyphrase extraction (AKE) an important but challenging task. Prior studies have used eye-tracking signals to improve microblog-based AKE because such signals reflect readers' attention to salient words. However, eye tracking alone is limited by physiological, acquisition, and feature-decoding constraints. To address this issue, we investigate whether electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can complement eye-tracking signals for AKE. Using the ZuCo cognitive language processing corpus, we select 8 EEG features and 17 eye-tracking features and incorporate them into microblog-based AKE models. To reduce possible distortion of cognitive signals by model structures, we inject these features into the input of the soft-attention layer and the query vectors of the self-attention layer. We then evaluate different combinations of cognitive signals across AKE models. The results show that cognitive signals produced during reading consistently improve AKE performance, regardless of feature combinations and model architectures. EEG features bring the largest gains, while combining EEG and eye-tracking features yields performance between the two individual signal types, suggesting partial complementarity but also possible redundancy or noise. These findings indicate that EEG signals provide useful cognitive evidence for microblog-based AKE and that multimodal cognitive signals deserve further investigation.
Xinyi Yan, Yingyi Zhang, Chengzhi Zhang
Jun 24, 2026cs.CV

What Does the Brain See? Multiview Neural Representations to Demystify the Brain-Visual Alignment

Zero-shot visual decoding from electroencephalography (EEG) aims to infer visual semantics from non-invasive neural recordings, but remains challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio, non-stationarity, and limited spatial resolution of EEG. Existing EEG-vision alignment methods often rely on holistic EEG embeddings, which can obscure the complementary temporal, spectral, and spatial structure underlying visual perception. We introduce a unified multiview EEG representation learning framework for aligning brain responses with visual semantic embeddings. Our method builds an EEG encoder that jointly models three complementary views: input-conditioned state-space temporal dynamics, learnable wavelet-based spectral decomposition for sample-adaptive frequency modeling, and attention-modulated graph learning for structured electrode interactions. The resulting multiview EEG embeddings are fused and aligned with pretrained visual representations in a shared semantic space using contrastive learning with EEG-specific regularization, enabling 200-way zero-shot visual classification. Experiments on THINGS-EEG benchmark show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 54.8% Top-1 and 85.6% Top-5 accuracy in the within-subject setting and 15.3% Top-1 and 45.4% Top-5 accuracy in the cross-subject setting. We further present the first systematic cross-session EEG-image decoding evaluation, achieving 40.8% Top-1 and 78.0% Top-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicitly modeling multiview neural structure improves both semantic alignment and generalization in EEG-based visual decoding.
Salini Yadav, Taveena Lotey, Pravendra Singh +1