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Aug 13

NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment

Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025

Alljoined-1.6M: A Million-Trial EEG-Image Dataset for Evaluating Affordable Brain-Computer Interfaces

We present a new large-scale electroencephalography (EEG) dataset as part of the THINGS initiative, comprising over 1.6 million visual stimulus trials collected from 20 participants, and totaling more than twice the size of the most popular current benchmark dataset, THINGS-EEG2. Crucially, our data was recorded using a 32-channel consumer-grade wet electrode system costing ~$2.2k, around 27x cheaper than research-grade EEG systems typically used in cognitive neuroscience labs. Our work is one of the first open-source, large-scale EEG resource designed to closely reflect the quality of hardware that is practical to deploy in real-world, downstream applications of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). We aim to explore the specific question of whether deep neural network-based BCI research and semantic decoding methods can be effectively conducted with such affordable systems, filling an important gap in current literature that is extremely relevant for future research. In our analysis, we not only demonstrate that decoding of high-level semantic information from EEG of visualized images is possible at consumer-grade hardware, but also that our data can facilitate effective EEG-to-Image reconstruction even despite significantly lower signal-to-noise ratios. In addition to traditional benchmarks, we also conduct analyses of EEG-to-Image models that demonstrate log-linear decoding performance with increasing data volume on our data, and discuss the trade-offs between hardware cost, signal fidelity, and the scale of data collection efforts in increasing the size and utility of currently available datasets. Our contributions aim to pave the way for large-scale, cost-effective EEG research with widely accessible equipment, and position our dataset as a unique resource for the democratization and development of effective deep neural models of visual cognition.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 25, 2025

Learning Interpretable Representations Leads to Semantically Faithful EEG-to-Text Generation

Pretrained generative models have opened new frontiers in brain decoding by enabling the synthesis of realistic texts and images from non-invasive brain recordings. However, the reliability of such outputs remains questionable--whether they truly reflect semantic activation in the brain, or are merely hallucinated by the powerful generative models. In this paper, we focus on EEG-to-text decoding and address its hallucination issue through the lens of posterior collapse. Acknowledging the underlying mismatch in information capacity between EEG and text, we reframe the decoding task as semantic summarization of core meanings rather than previously verbatim reconstruction of stimulus texts. To this end, we propose the Generative Language Inspection Model (GLIM), which emphasizes learning informative and interpretable EEG representations to improve semantic grounding under heterogeneous and small-scale data conditions. Experiments on the public ZuCo dataset demonstrate that GLIM consistently generates fluent, EEG-grounded sentences without teacher forcing. Moreover, it supports more robust evaluation beyond text similarity, through EEG-text retrieval and zero-shot semantic classification across sentiment categories, relation types, and corpus topics. Together, our architecture and evaluation protocols lay the foundation for reliable and scalable benchmarking in generative brain decoding.

  • 3 authors
·
May 21, 2025

REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG -- Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects

Foundation models have transformed AI by reducing reliance on task-specific data through large-scale pretraining. While successful in language and vision, their adoption in EEG has lagged due to the heterogeneity of public datasets, which are collected under varying protocols, devices, and electrode configurations. Existing EEG foundation models struggle to generalize across these variations, often restricting pretraining to a single setup, resulting in suboptimal performance, in particular under linear probing. We present REVE (Representation for EEG with Versatile Embeddings), a pretrained model explicitly designed to generalize across diverse EEG signals. REVE introduces a novel 4D positional encoding scheme that enables it to process signals of arbitrary length and electrode arrangement. Using a masked autoencoding objective, we pretrain REVE on over 60,000 hours of EEG data from 92 datasets spanning 25,000 subjects, representing the largest EEG pretraining effort to date. REVE achieves state-of-the-art results on 10 downstream EEG tasks, including motor imagery classification, seizure detection, sleep staging, cognitive load estimation, and emotion recognition. With little to no fine-tuning, it demonstrates strong generalization, and nuanced spatio-temporal modeling. We release code, pretrained weights, and tutorials to support standardized EEG research and accelerate progress in clinical neuroscience.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 24, 2025

Visual Decoding and Reconstruction via EEG Embeddings with Guided Diffusion

How to decode human vision through neural signals has attracted a long-standing interest in neuroscience and machine learning. Modern contrastive learning and generative models improved the performance of fMRI-based visual decoding and reconstruction. However, the high cost and low temporal resolution of fMRI limit their applications in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), prompting a high need for EEG-based visual reconstruction. In this study, we present an EEG-based visual reconstruction framework. It consists of a plug-and-play EEG encoder called the Adaptive Thinking Mapper (ATM), which is aligned with image embeddings, and a two-stage EEG guidance image generator that first transforms EEG features into image priors and then reconstructs the visual stimuli with a pre-trained image generator. Our approach allows EEG embeddings to achieve superior performance in image classification and retrieval tasks. Our two-stage image generation strategy vividly reconstructs images seen by humans. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of signals from different time windows and brain regions on decoding and reconstruction. The versatility of our framework is demonstrated in the magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data modality. We report that EEG-based visual decoding achieves SOTA performance, highlighting the portability, low cost, and high temporal resolution of EEG, enabling a wide range of BCI applications. The code of ATM is available at https://github.com/dongyangli-del/EEG_Image_decode.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

Classification of BCI-EEG based on augmented covariance matrix

Objective: Electroencephalography signals are recorded as a multidimensional dataset. We propose a new framework based on the augmented covariance extracted from an autoregressive model to improve motor imagery classification. Methods: From the autoregressive model can be derived the Yule-Walker equations, which show the emergence of a symmetric positive definite matrix: the augmented covariance matrix. The state-of the art for classifying covariance matrices is based on Riemannian Geometry. A fairly natural idea is therefore to extend the standard approach using these augmented covariance matrices. The methodology for creating the augmented covariance matrix shows a natural connection with the delay embedding theorem proposed by Takens for dynamical systems. Such an embedding method is based on the knowledge of two parameters: the delay and the embedding dimension, respectively related to the lag and the order of the autoregressive model. This approach provides new methods to compute the hyper-parameters in addition to standard grid search. Results: The augmented covariance matrix performed noticeably better than any state-of-the-art methods. We will test our approach on several datasets and several subjects using the MOABB framework, using both within-session and cross-session evaluation. Conclusion: The improvement in results is due to the fact that the augmented covariance matrix incorporates not only spatial but also temporal information, incorporating nonlinear components of the signal through an embedding procedure, which allows the leveraging of dynamical systems algorithms. Significance: These results extend the concepts and the results of the Riemannian distance based classification algorithm.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 9, 2023

EEG motor imagery decoding: A framework for comparative analysis with channel attention mechanisms

The objective of this study is to investigate the application of various channel attention mechanisms within the domain of brain-computer interface (BCI) for motor imagery decoding. Channel attention mechanisms can be seen as a powerful evolution of spatial filters traditionally used for motor imagery decoding. This study systematically compares such mechanisms by integrating them into a lightweight architecture framework to evaluate their impact. We carefully construct a straightforward and lightweight baseline architecture designed to seamlessly integrate different channel attention mechanisms. This approach is contrary to previous works which only investigate one attention mechanism and usually build a very complex, sometimes nested architecture. Our framework allows us to evaluate and compare the impact of different attention mechanisms under the same circumstances. The easy integration of different channel attention mechanisms as well as the low computational complexity enables us to conduct a wide range of experiments on four datasets to thoroughly assess the effectiveness of the baseline model and the attention mechanisms. Our experiments demonstrate the strength and generalizability of our architecture framework as well as how channel attention mechanisms can improve the performance while maintaining the small memory footprint and low computational complexity of our baseline architecture. Our architecture emphasizes simplicity, offering easy integration of channel attention mechanisms, while maintaining a high degree of generalizability across datasets, making it a versatile and efficient solution for EEG motor imagery decoding within brain-computer interfaces.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

AGTCNet: A Graph-Temporal Approach for Principled Motor Imagery EEG Classification

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) marks a transformative innovation, empowering motor-impaired individuals to engage with their environment on equal footing. Despite its promising potential, developing subject-invariant and session-invariant BCI systems remains a significant challenge due to the inherent complexity and variability of neural activity across individuals and over time, compounded by EEG hardware constraints. While prior studies have sought to develop robust BCI systems, existing approaches remain ineffective in capturing the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies within multichannel EEG signals. This study addresses this gap by introducing the attentive graph-temporal convolutional network (AGTCNet), a novel graph-temporal model for motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG) classification. Specifically, AGTCNet leverages the topographic configuration of EEG electrodes as an inductive bias and integrates graph convolutional attention network (GCAT) to jointly learn expressive spatiotemporal EEG representations. The proposed model significantly outperformed existing MI-EEG classifiers, achieving state-of-the-art performance while utilizing a compact architecture, underscoring its effectiveness and practicality for BCI deployment. With a 49.87% reduction in model size, 64.65% faster inference time, and shorter input EEG signal, AGTCNet achieved a moving average accuracy of 66.82% for subject-independent classification on the BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a, which further improved to 82.88% when fine-tuned for subject-specific classification. On the EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset, AGTCNet achieved moving average accuracies of 64.14% and 85.22% for 4-class and 2-class subject-independent classifications, respectively, with further improvements to 72.13% and 90.54% for subject-specific classifications.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025

Aggregating Intrinsic Information to Enhance BCI Performance through Federated Learning

Insufficient data is a long-standing challenge for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to build a high-performance deep learning model. Though numerous research groups and institutes collect a multitude of EEG datasets for the same BCI task, sharing EEG data from multiple sites is still challenging due to the heterogeneity of devices. The significance of this challenge cannot be overstated, given the critical role of data diversity in fostering model robustness. However, existing works rarely discuss this issue, predominantly centering their attention on model training within a single dataset, often in the context of inter-subject or inter-session settings. In this work, we propose a hierarchical personalized Federated Learning EEG decoding (FLEEG) framework to surmount this challenge. This innovative framework heralds a new learning paradigm for BCI, enabling datasets with disparate data formats to collaborate in the model training process. Each client is assigned a specific dataset and trains a hierarchical personalized model to manage diverse data formats and facilitate information exchange. Meanwhile, the server coordinates the training procedure to harness knowledge gleaned from all datasets, thus elevating overall performance. The framework has been evaluated in Motor Imagery (MI) classification with nine EEG datasets collected by different devices but implementing the same MI task. Results demonstrate that the proposed frame can boost classification performance up to 16.7% by enabling knowledge sharing between multiple datasets, especially for smaller datasets. Visualization results also indicate that the proposed framework can empower the local models to put a stable focus on task-related areas, yielding better performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end solution to address this important challenge.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 14, 2023

MVCNet: Multi-View Contrastive Network for Motor Imagery Classification

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable neural interaction by decoding brain activity for external communication. Motor imagery (MI) decoding has received significant attention due to its intuitive mechanism. However, most existing models rely on single-stream architectures and overlook the multi-view nature of EEG signals, leading to limited performance and generalization. We propose a multi-view contrastive network (MVCNet), a dual-branch architecture that parallelly integrates CNN and Transformer models to capture both local spatial-temporal features and global temporal dependencies. To enhance the informativeness of training data, MVCNet incorporates a unified augmentation pipeline across time, frequency, and spatial domains. Two contrastive modules are further introduced: a cross-view contrastive module that enforces consistency of original and augmented views, and a cross-model contrastive module that aligns features extracted from both branches. Final representations are fused and jointly optimized by contrastive and classification losses. Experiments on five public MI datasets across three scenarios demonstrate that MVCNet consistently outperforms seven state-of-the-art MI decoding networks, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization ability. MVCNet provides a robust solution for MI decoding by integrating multi-view information and dual-branch modeling, contributing to the development of more reliable BCI systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025

Neural Codecs as Biosignal Tokenizers

Neurophysiological recordings such as electroencephalography (EEG) offer accessible and minimally invasive means of estimating physiological activity for applications in healthcare, diagnostic screening, and even immersive entertainment. However, these recordings yield high-dimensional, noisy time-series data that typically require extensive pre-processing and handcrafted feature extraction to reveal meaningful information. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in applying representation learning techniques from large pre-trained (foundation) models to effectively decode and interpret biosignals. We discuss the challenges posed for incorporating such methods and introduce BioCodec, an alternative representation learning framework inspired by neural codecs to capture low-level signal characteristics in the form of discrete tokens. Pre-trained on thousands of EEG hours, BioCodec shows efficacy across multiple downstream tasks, ranging from clinical diagnostic tasks and sleep physiology to decoding speech and motor imagery, particularly in low-resource settings. Additionally, we provide a qualitative analysis of codebook usage and estimate the spatial coherence of codebook embeddings from EEG connectivity. Notably, we also document the suitability of our method to other biosignal data, i.e., electromyographic (EMG) signals. Overall, the proposed approach provides a versatile solution for biosignal tokenization that performs competitively with state-of-the-art models. The source code and model checkpoints are shared.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

NeuroBOLT: Resting-state EEG-to-fMRI Synthesis with Multi-dimensional Feature Mapping

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an indispensable tool in modern neuroscience, providing a non-invasive window into whole-brain dynamics at millimeter-scale spatial resolution. However, fMRI is constrained by issues such as high operation costs and immobility. With the rapid advancements in cross-modality synthesis and brain decoding, the use of deep neural networks has emerged as a promising solution for inferring whole-brain, high-resolution fMRI features directly from electroencephalography (EEG), a more widely accessible and portable neuroimaging modality. Nonetheless, the complex projection from neural activity to fMRI hemodynamic responses and the spatial ambiguity of EEG pose substantial challenges both in modeling and interpretability. Relatively few studies to date have developed approaches for EEG-fMRI translation, and although they have made significant strides, the inference of fMRI signals in a given study has been limited to a small set of brain areas and to a single condition (i.e., either resting-state or a specific task). The capability to predict fMRI signals in other brain areas, as well as to generalize across conditions, remain critical gaps in the field. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel and generalizable framework: NeuroBOLT, i.e., Neuro-to-BOLD Transformer, which leverages multi-dimensional representation learning from temporal, spatial, and spectral domains to translate raw EEG data to the corresponding fMRI activity signals across the brain. Our experiments demonstrate that NeuroBOLT effectively reconstructs unseen resting-state fMRI signals from primary sensory, high-level cognitive areas, and deep subcortical brain regions, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with the potential to generalize across varying conditions and sites, which significantly advances the integration of these two modalities.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 6, 2024

NeuroSonic: Conditional Flow Matching for EEG-to-Speech Reconstruction

Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22

ADHDeepNet From Raw EEG to Diagnosis: Improving ADHD Diagnosis through Temporal-Spatial Processing, Adaptive Attention Mechanisms, and Explainability in Raw EEG Signals

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common brain disorder in children that can persist into adulthood, affecting social, academic, and career life. Early diagnosis is crucial for managing these impacts on patients and the healthcare system but is often labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel method to improve ADHD diagnosis precision and timeliness by leveraging Deep Learning (DL) approaches and electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. We introduce ADHDeepNet, a DL model that utilizes comprehensive temporal-spatial characterization, attention modules, and explainability techniques optimized for EEG signals. ADHDeepNet integrates feature extraction and refinement processes to enhance ADHD diagnosis. The model was trained and validated on a dataset of 121 participants (61 ADHD, 60 Healthy Controls), employing nested cross-validation for robust performance. The proposed two-stage methodology uses a 10-fold cross-subject validation strategy. Initially, each iteration optimizes the model's hyper-parameters with inner 2-fold cross-validation. Then, Additive Gaussian Noise (AGN) with various standard deviations and magnification levels is applied for data augmentation. ADHDeepNet achieved 100% sensitivity and 99.17% accuracy in classifying ADHD/HC subjects. To clarify model explainability and identify key brain regions and frequency bands for ADHD diagnosis, we analyzed the learned weights and activation patterns of the model's primary layers. Additionally, t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) visualized high-dimensional data, aiding in interpreting the model's decisions. This study highlights the potential of DL and EEG in enhancing ADHD diagnosis accuracy and efficiency.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 10, 2025

DeWave: Discrete EEG Waves Encoding for Brain Dynamics to Text Translation

The translation of brain dynamics into natural language is pivotal for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). With the swift advancement of large language models, such as ChatGPT, the need to bridge the gap between the brain and languages becomes increasingly pressing. Current methods, however, require eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features, which can restrict the practical application of these systems. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel framework, DeWave, that integrates discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks. DeWave uses a quantized variational encoder to derive discrete codex encoding and align it with pre-trained language models. This discrete codex representation brings forth two advantages: 1) it realizes translation on raw waves without marker by introducing text-EEG contrastive alignment training, and 2) it alleviates the interference caused by individual differences in EEG waves through an invariant discrete codex with or without markers. Our model surpasses the previous baseline (40.1 and 31.7) by 3.06% and 6.34%, respectively, achieving 41.35 BLEU-1 and 33.71 Rouge-F on the ZuCo Dataset. This work is the first to facilitate the translation of entire EEG signal periods without word-level order markers (e.g., eye fixations), scoring 20.5 BLEU-1 and 29.5 Rouge-1 on the ZuCo Dataset.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 25, 2023

Scaling Law in Neural Data: Non-Invasive Speech Decoding with 175 Hours of EEG Data

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) hold great potential for aiding individuals with speech impairments. Utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) to decode speech is particularly promising due to its non-invasive nature. However, recordings are typically short, and the high variability in EEG data has led researchers to focus on classification tasks with a few dozen classes. To assess its practical applicability for speech neuroprostheses, we investigate the relationship between the size of EEG data and decoding accuracy in the open vocabulary setting. We collected extensive EEG data from a single participant (175 hours) and conducted zero-shot speech segment classification using self-supervised representation learning. The model trained on the entire dataset achieved a top-1 accuracy of 48\% and a top-10 accuracy of 76\%, while mitigating the effects of myopotential artifacts. Conversely, when the data was limited to the typical amount used in practice (sim10 hours), the top-1 accuracy dropped to 2.5\%, revealing a significant scaling effect. Additionally, as the amount of training data increased, the EEG latent representation progressively exhibited clearer temporal structures of spoken phrases. This indicates that the decoder can recognize speech segments in a data-driven manner without explicit measurements of word recognition. This research marks a significant step towards the practical realization of EEG-based speech BCIs.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025 2

From Video to EEG: Adapting Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture to Uncover Visual Concepts in Brain Signal Analysis

EEG signals capture brain activity with high temporal and low spatial resolution, supporting applications such as neurological diagnosis, cognitive monitoring, and brain-computer interfaces. However, effective analysis is hindered by limited labeled data, high dimensionality, and the absence of scalable models that fully capture spatiotemporal dependencies. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods often focus on either spatial or temporal features, leading to suboptimal representations. To this end, we propose EEG-VJEPA, a novel adaptation of the Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA) for EEG classification. By treating EEG as video-like sequences, EEG-VJEPA learns semantically meaningful spatiotemporal representations using joint embeddings and adaptive masking. To our knowledge, this is the first work that exploits V-JEPA for EEG classification and explores the visual concepts learned by the model. Evaluations on the publicly available Temple University Hospital (TUH) Abnormal EEG dataset show that EEG-VJEPA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in classification accuracy. Beyond classification accuracy, EEG-VJEPA captures physiologically relevant spatial and temporal signal patterns, offering interpretable embeddings that may support human-AI collaboration in diagnostic workflows. These findings position EEG-VJEPA as a promising framework for scalable, trustworthy EEG analysis in real-world clinical settings.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

Laya: A LeJEPA Approach to EEG via Latent Prediction over Reconstruction

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used tool for studying brain function, with applications in clinical neuroscience, diagnosis, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Recent EEG foundation models trained on large unlabeled corpora aim to learn transferable representations, but their effectiveness remains unclear; reported improvements over smaller task-specific models are often modest, sensitive to downstream adaptation and fine-tuning strategies, and limited under linear probing. We hypothesize that one contributing factor is the reliance on signal reconstruction as the primary self-supervised learning (SSL) objective, which biases representations toward high-variance artifacts rather than task-relevant neural structure. To address this limitation, we explore an SSL paradigm based on Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), which learn by predicting latent representations instead of reconstructing raw signals. We introduce Laya, the first EEG foundation model based on LeJEPA. We show that latent prediction yields representations that encode semantic structure in EEG: Laya embeddings track clinically meaningful state changes such as seizure onset, are resilient to noise, and achieve the strongest mean clinical accuracy under frozen linear probing, with particular gains on tasks where relevant neural patterns are subtle and easily obscured by artifacts. Controlled ablations against matched MAE variants confirm that the choice of pretraining objective, rather than architecture or data, is the primary driver of these gains.

  • 5 authors
·
May 6

DBConformer: Dual-Branch Convolutional Transformer for EEG Decoding

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transform spontaneous/evoked neural activity into control commands for external communication. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remain the mainstream backbone for EEG decoding, their inherently short receptive field makes it difficult to capture long-range temporal dependencies and global inter-channel relationships. Recent CNN-Transformer (Conformers) hybrids partially address this issue, but most adopt a serial design, resulting in suboptimal integration of local and global features, and often overlook explicit channel-wise modeling. To address these limitations, we propose DBConformer, a dual-branch convolutional Transformer network tailored for EEG decoding. It integrates a temporal Conformer to model long-range temporal dependencies and a spatial Conformer to extract inter-channel interactions, capturing both temporal dynamics and spatial patterns in EEG signals. A lightweight channel attention module further refines spatial representations by assigning data-driven importance to EEG channels. Extensive experiments on five motor imagery (MI) datasets and two seizure detection datasets under three evaluation settings demonstrate that DBConformer consistently outperforms 10 competitive baseline models, with over eight times fewer parameters than the high-capacity EEG Conformer baseline. Further, the visualization results confirm that the features extracted by DBConformer are physiologically interpretable and aligned with sensorimotor priors in MI. The superior performance and interpretability of DBConformer make it reliable for robust and explainable EEG decoding. Code is publicized at https://github.com/wzwvv/DBConformer.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025

hvEEGNet: exploiting hierarchical VAEs on EEG data for neuroscience applications

With the recent success of artificial intelligence in neuroscience, a number of deep learning (DL) models were proposed for classification, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition tasks in electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is a multi-channel time-series that provides information about the individual brain activity for diagnostics, neuro-rehabilitation, and other applications (including emotions recognition). Two main issues challenge the existing DL-based modeling methods for EEG: the high variability between subjects and the low signal-to-noise ratio making it difficult to ensure a good quality in the EEG data. In this paper, we propose two variational autoencoder models, namely vEEGNet-ver3 and hvEEGNet, to target the problem of high-fidelity EEG reconstruction. We properly designed their architectures using the blocks of the well-known EEGNet as the encoder, and proposed a loss function based on dynamic time warping. We tested the models on the public Dataset 2a - BCI Competition IV, where EEG was collected from 9 subjects and 22 channels. hvEEGNet was found to reconstruct the EEG data with very high-fidelity, outperforming most previous solutions (including our vEEGNet-ver3 ). Furthermore, this was consistent across all subjects. Interestingly, hvEEGNet made it possible to discover that this popular dataset includes a number of corrupted EEG recordings that might have influenced previous literature results. We also investigated the training behaviour of our models and related it with the quality and the size of the input EEG dataset, aiming at opening a new research debate on this relationship. In the future, hvEEGNet could be used as anomaly (e.g., artefact) detector in large EEG datasets to support the domain experts, but also the latent representations it provides could be used in other classification problems and EEG data generation.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 20, 2023

Enhancing Epileptic Seizure Detection with EEG Feature Embeddings

Epilepsy is one of the most prevalent brain disorders that disrupts the lives of millions worldwide. For patients with drug-resistant seizures, there exist implantable devices capable of monitoring neural activity, promptly triggering neurostimulation to regulate seizures, or alerting patients of potential episodes. Next-generation seizure detection systems heavily rely on high-accuracy machine learning-based classifiers to detect the seizure onset. Here, we propose to enhance the seizure detection performance by learning informative embeddings of the EEG signal. We empirically demonstrate, for the first time, that converting raw EEG signals to appropriate embeddings can significantly boost the performance of seizure detection algorithms. Importantly, we show that embedding features, which converts the raw EEG into an alternative representation, is beneficial for various machine learning models such as Logistic Regression, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Support Vector Machines, and Gradient Boosted Trees. The experiments were conducted on the CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset. With the proposed EEG feature embeddings, we achieve significant improvements in sensitivity, specificity, and AUC score across multiple models. By employing this approach alongside an SVM classifier, we were able to attain state-of-the-art classification performance with a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 99%, setting a new benchmark in the field.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 28, 2023

EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Brain computer interfaces (BCI) enable direct communication with a computer, using neural activity as the control signal. This neural signal is generally chosen from a variety of well-studied electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. For a given BCI paradigm, feature extractors and classifiers are tailored to the distinct characteristics of its expected EEG control signal, limiting its application to that specific signal. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which have been used in computer vision and speech recognition, have successfully been applied to EEG-based BCIs; however, they have mainly been applied to single BCI paradigms and thus it remains unclear how these architectures generalize to other paradigms. Here, we ask if we can design a single CNN architecture to accurately classify EEG signals from different BCI paradigms, while simultaneously being as compact as possible. In this work we introduce EEGNet, a compact convolutional network for EEG-based BCIs. We introduce the use of depthwise and separable convolutions to construct an EEG-specific model which encapsulates well-known EEG feature extraction concepts for BCI. We compare EEGNet to current state-of-the-art approaches across four BCI paradigms: P300 visual-evoked potentials, error-related negativity responses (ERN), movement-related cortical potentials (MRCP), and sensory motor rhythms (SMR). We show that EEGNet generalizes across paradigms better than the reference algorithms when only limited training data is available. We demonstrate three different approaches to visualize the contents of a trained EEGNet model to enable interpretation of the learned features. Our results suggest that EEGNet is robust enough to learn a wide variety of interpretable features over a range of BCI tasks, suggesting that the observed performances were not due to artifact or noise sources in the data.

  • 6 authors
·
May 15, 2018

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24 1

Graph Neural Networks Uncover Geometric Neural Representations in Reinforcement-Based Motor Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) can capture the geometric properties of neural representations in EEG data. Here we utilise those to study how reinforcement-based motor learning affects neural activity patterns during motor planning, leveraging the inherent graph structure of EEG channels to capture the spatial relationships in brain activity. By exploiting task-specific symmetries, we define different pretraining strategies that not only improve model performance across all participant groups but also validate the robustness of the geometric representations. Explainability analysis based on the graph structures reveals consistent group-specific neural signatures that persist across pretraining conditions, suggesting stable geometric structures in the neural representations associated with motor learning and feedback processing. These geometric patterns exhibit partial invariance to certain task space transformations, indicating symmetries that enable generalisation across conditions while maintaining specificity to individual learning strategies. This work demonstrates how GNNs can uncover the effects of previous outcomes on motor planning, in a complex real-world task, providing insights into the geometric principles governing neural representations. Our experimental design bridges the gap between controlled experiments and ecologically valid scenarios, offering new insights into the organisation of neural representations during naturalistic motor learning, which may open avenues for exploring fundamental principles governing brain activity in complex tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2024

Electroencephalographic field influence on calcium momentum waves

Macroscopic EEG fields can be an explicit top-down neocortical mechanism that directly drives bottom-up processes that describe memory, attention, and other neuronal processes. The top-down mechanism considered are macrocolumnar EEG firings in neocortex, as described by a statistical mechanics of neocortical interactions (SMNI), developed as a magnetic vector potential A. The bottom-up process considered are Ca^{2+} waves prominent in synaptic and extracellular processes that are considered to greatly influence neuronal firings. Here, the complimentary effects are considered, i.e., the influence of A on Ca^{2+} momentum, p. The canonical momentum of a charged particle in an electromagnetic field, mathbfΠ = p + q A (SI units), is calculated, where the charge of Ca^{2+} is q = - 2 e, e is the magnitude of the charge of an electron. Calculations demonstrate that macroscopic EEG A can be quite influential on the momentum p of Ca^{2+} ions, in both classical and quantum mechanics. Molecular scales of Ca^{2+} wave dynamics are coupled with A fields developed at macroscopic regional scales measured by coherent neuronal firing activity measured by scalp EEG. The project has three main aspects: fitting A models to EEG data as reported here, building tripartite models to develop A models, and studying long coherence times of Ca^{2+} waves in the presence of A due to coherent neuronal firings measured by scalp EEG. The SMNI model supports a mechanism wherein the p + q A interaction at tripartite synapses, via a dynamic centering mechanism (DCM) to control background synaptic activity, acts to maintain short-term memory (STM) during states of selective attention.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 22, 2013