Speech is a fundamental form of human communication, and speech perception constitutes the initial stage of language comprehension. Although brain-to-speech interface technologies have made significant progress in recent years, most existing studies focus on neural decoding during speech production. Such approaches heavily rely on articulatory motor regions, rendering them unsuitable for individuals with speech motor impairments, such as those with aphasia or locked-in syndrome. To address this limitation, we construct and release NeuroListen, the first publicly available stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG) dataset specifically designed for auditory reconstruction. It contains over 10 hours of neuralspeech paired recordings from 5 clinical participants, covering a wide range of semantic categories. Building on this dataset, we propose HyperSpeech, a multi-band neural decoding framework that employs dynamic spatio-temporal hypergraph neural networks to capture high-order dependencies across frequency, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that HyperSpeech significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple objective speech quality metrics, and achieves superior performance in human subjective evaluations, validating its effectiveness and advancement. This study provides a dedicated dataset and modeling framework for auditory speech decoding, offering foundations for neural language processing and assistive communication systems.

Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose FAPEX, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable fractional neural frame operator (FrNFO) for adaptive time-frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately 10% improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines. The FrNFO enables the extraction of instantaneous phase and amplitude representations that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. FAPEXfurther integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages.

Automated seizure detection is of great importance to epilepsy diagnosis and treatment. An emerging method used in seizure detection, stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG), can provide detailed and stereoscopic brainwave information. However, modeling SEEG in clinical scenarios will face challenges like huge domain shift between different patients and dramatic pattern evolution among different brain areas. In this study, we propose a Pretraining-based model for Patient-independent seizure detection (PPi) to address these challenges. Firstly, we design two novel self-supervised tasks which can extract rich information from abundant SEEG data while preserving the unique characteristics between brain signals recorded from different brain areas. Then two techniques, channel background subtraction and brain region enhancement, are proposed to effectively tackle the domain shift problem. Extensive experiments show that PPi outperforms the SOTA baselines on two public datasets and a real-world clinical dataset collected by us, which demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of PPi. Finally, visualization analysis illustrates the rationality of the two domain generalization techniques.

ARIA has a billion-dollar budget and big aspirations for tackling everything from epilepsy to Alzheimer's. The UK's Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) was established in 2023 with the goal of pursuing "high-risk, high-reward" moonshots in sectors ranging from bolstering food security to new ways of ramping up human immunity . With more than £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) worth of government funding earmarked between now and 2030, one of ARIA's most ambitious programs is a £69 million initiative that aims to develop more tailored ways of modulating the human brain. The hope is to eventually address an entire range of disorders, from epilepsy to Alzheimer's. Reports have previously estimated that this suite of neurological conditions costs the UK economy tens of billions of dollars each year.

This paper presents a probabilistic-graphical model that can be used to infer characteristics of instantaneous brain activity by jointly analyzing spatial and temporal dependencies observed in electroencephalograms (EEG). Specifically, we describe a factor-graph-based model with customized factor-functions defined based on domain knowledge, to infer pathologic brain activity with the goal of identifying seizure-generating brain regions in epilepsy patients. We utilize an inference technique based on the graph-cut algorithm to exactly solve graph inference in polynomial time. We validate the model by using clinically collected intracranial EEG data from 29 epilepsy patients to show that the model correctly identifies seizure-generating brain regions. Our results indicate that our model outperforms two conventional approaches used for seizure-onset localization (5-7% better AUC: 0.72, 0.67, 0.65) and that the proposed inference technique provides 3-10% gain in AUC (0.72, 0.62, 0.69) compared to sampling-based alternatives.

Automated seizure detection is of great importance to epilepsy diagnosis and treatment.

Predicting critical transitions in complex systems, such as epileptic seizures in the brain, represents a major challenge in scientific research. The high-dimensional characteristics and hidden critical signals further complicate early-warning tasks. This study proposes a novel early-warning framework that integrates manifold learning with stochastic dynamical system modeling. Through systematic comparison, six methods including diffusion maps (DM) are selected to construct low-dimensional representations. Based on these, a data-driven stochastic differential equation model is established to robustly estimate the probability evolution scoring function of the system. Building on this, a new Score Function (SF) indicator is defined by incorporating Schrödinger bridge theory to quantify the likelihood of significant state transitions in the system. Experiments demonstrate that this indicator exhibits higher sensitivity and robustness in epilepsy prediction, enables earlier identification of critical points, and clearly captures dynamic features across various stages before and after seizure onset. This work provides a systematic theoretical framework and practical methodology for extracting early-warning signals from high-dimensional data.

Pathophysiolpgical modelling of brain systems from microscale to macroscale remains difficult in group comparisons partly because of the infeasibility of modelling the interactions of thousands of neurons at the scales involved. Here, to address the challenge, we present a novel approach to construct differential causal networks directly from electroencephalogram (EEG) data. The proposed network is based on conditionally coupled neuronal circuits which describe the average behaviour of interacting neuron populations that contribute to observed EEG data. In the network, each node represents a parameterised local neural system while directed edges stand for node-wise connections with transmission parameters. The network is hierarchically structured in the sense that node and edge parameters are varying in subjects but follow a mixed-effects model. A novel evolutionary optimisation algorithm for parameter inference in the proposed method is developed using a loss function derived from Chen-Fliess expansions of stochastic differential equations. The method is demonstrated by application to the fitting of coupled Jansen-Rit local models. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on both synthetic and real EEG data. In the real EEG data analysis, we track changes in the parameters that characterise dynamic causality within brains that demonstrate epileptic activity. We show evidence of network functional disruptions, due to imbalance of excitatory-inhibitory interneurons and altered epileptic brain connectivity, before and during seizure periods.

Emergent phenomena -- onset of epileptic seizures, sudden customer churn, or pandemic outbreaks -- often arise from hidden causal interactions in complex systems. We propose a machine learning method for their early detection that addresses a core challenge: unveiling and harnessing a system's latent causal structure despite the data-generating process being unknown and partially observed. The method learns an optimal feature representation from a one-parameter family of estimators -- powers of the empirical covariance or precision matrix -- offering a principled way to tune in to the underlying structure driving the emergence of critical events. A supervised learning module then classifies the learned representation. We prove structural consistency of the family and demonstrate the empirical soundness of our approach on seizure detection and churn prediction, attaining competitive results in both. Beyond prediction, and toward explainability, we ascertain that the optimal covariance power exhibits evidence of good identifiability while capturing structural signatures, thus reconciling predictive performance with interpretable statistical structure.