Large-scale pre-training has shown great potential to enhance models on downstream tasks in vision and language. Developing similar techniques for scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) is suitable since unlabelled data is plentiful.

Traditional SSVEP-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems rely heavily on external visual stimulus equipment, limiting their practicality in real-world settings. This study proposes an augmented reality steady-state visually evoked potential (AR-SSVEP) system to address the lack of patient initiative and the high workload on therapists. Firstly, we design four HoloLens 2-based EEG classes and collect EEG data from seven healthy subjects for analysis. Secondly, we build upon the conventional CNN-BiLSTM architecture by integrating a multi-head attention mechanism (MACNN-BiLSTM). We extract ten temporal-spectral EEG features and feed them into a CNN to learn high-level representations. Then, we use BiLSTM to model sequential dependencies and apply a multi-head attention mechanism to highlight motor-intention-related patterns. Finally, the SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) method is applied to visualize EEG feature contributions to the neural network's decision-making process, enhancing the model's interpretability. These findings enhance real-time motor intention recognition and support recovery in patients with motor impairments.

Robust decoding and classification of brain patterns measured with electroencephalography (EEG) remains a major challenge for real-world (i.e. outside scientific lab and medical facilities) brain-computer interface (BCI) applications due to well documented inter- and intra-participant variability. Here, we present a large-scale benchmark evaluating over 340,000+ unique combinations of spatial and nonlinear EEG classification. Our methodological pipeline consists in combinations of Common Spatial Patterns (CSP), Riemannian geometry, functional connectivity, and fractal- or entropy-based features across three open-access EEG datasets. Unlike prior studies, our analysis operates at the per-participant level and across multiple frequency bands (8-15 Hz and 8-30 Hz), enabling direct assessment of both group-level performance and individual variability. Covariance tangent space projection (cov-tgsp) and CSP consistently achieved the highest average classification accuracies. However, their effectiveness was strongly dataset-dependent, and marked participant-level differences persisted, particularly in the most heterogeneous of the datasets. Importantly, nonlinear methods outperformed spatial approaches for specific individuals, underscoring the need for personalized pipeline selection. Our findings highlight that no universal 'one-size-fits-all' method can optimally decode EEG motor imagery patterns across all users or datasets. Future work will require adaptive, multimodal, and possibly novel approaches to fully address neurophysiological variability in practical BCI applications where the system can automatically adapt to what makes each user unique.

EEG and audio are inherently distinct modalities, differing in sampling rate, channel structure, and scale. Yet, we show that pretrained neural audio codecs can serve as effective starting points for EEG compression, provided that the data are preprocessed to be suitable to the codec's input constraints. Using DAC, a state-of-the-art neural audio codec as our base, we demonstrate that raw EEG can be mapped into the codec's stride-based framing, enabling direct reuse of the audio-pretrained encoder-decoder. Even without modification, this setup yields stable EEG reconstructions, and fine-tuning on EEG data further improves fidelity and generalization compared to training from scratch. We systematically explore compression-quality trade-offs by varying residual codebook depth, codebook (vocabulary) size, and input sampling rate. To capture spatial dependencies across electrodes, we propose DAC-MC, a multi-channel extension with attention-based cross-channel aggregation and channel-specific decoding, while retaining the audio-pretrained initialization. Evaluations on the TUH Abnormal and Epilepsy datasets show that the adapted codecs preserve clinically relevant information, as reflected in spectrogram-based reconstruction loss and downstream classification accuracy.

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to enable intuitive control of prosthetic limbs for individuals with upper limb amputations. However, existing EEG-based control systems face challenges related to signal noise, classification accuracy, and real-time adaptability. In this work, we present BRAVE, a hybrid EEG and voice-controlled prosthetic system that integrates ensemble learning-based EEG classification with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) correction framework for enhanced responsiveness. Unlike traditional electromyography (EMG)-based prosthetic control, BRAVE aims to interpret EEG-driven motor intent, enabling movement control without reliance on residual muscle activity. To improve classification robustness, BRAVE combines LSTM, CNN, and Random Forest models in an ensemble framework, achieving a classification accuracy of 96% across test subjects. EEG signals are preprocessed using a bandpass filter (0.5-45 Hz), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for artifact removal, and Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) feature extraction to minimize contamination from electromyographic (EMG) and electrooculographic (EOG) signals. Additionally, BRAVE incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR) to facilitate intuitive mode switching between different degrees of freedom (DOF) in the prosthetic arm. The system operates in real time, with a response latency of 150 ms, leveraging Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) networking for synchronized data acquisition. The system is evaluated on an in-house fabricated prosthetic arm and on multiple participants highlighting the generalizability across users. The system is optimized for low-power embedded deployment, ensuring practical real-world application beyond high-performance computing environments. Our results indicate that BRAVE offers a promising step towards robust, real-time, non-invasive prosthetic control.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) pretrained on data from multiple domains have shown strong performance on diverse modeling tasks. Various efforts have been made to develop foundation models specific to electroencephalography (EEG) data, which records brain electrical activity as time series. However, no comparative analysis of EEG-specific foundation models (EEGFMs) versus general TSFMs has been performed on EEG-specific tasks. We introduce a novel Spatial-Temporal Adapter with Multi-Head Pooling (STAMP), which leverages univariate embeddings produced by a general TSFM, implicitly models spatial-temporal characteristics of EEG data, and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art EEGFMs. A comprehensive analysis is performed on 8 benchmark datasets of clinical tasks using EEG for classification, along with ablation studies. Our proposed adapter is lightweight in trainable parameters and flexible in the inputs it can accommodate, supporting easy modeling of EEG data using TSFMs.

The recent availability of large datasets in bio-medicine has inspired the development of representation learning methods for multiple healthcare applications.

Furthermore, the dimensionality of the data is large, often comparable to the sample size.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Text generating capabilities have undergone a substantial transformation with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). Electroencephalography (EEG)-based text production is still difficult, though, because it requires a lot of data and processing power. This paper introduces a new method that combines the use of the Gemma 2B LLM with a classifier-LLM architecture to incorporate a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder. Our approach drastically lowers the amount of data and compute power needed while achieving performance close to that of cutting-edge methods. Notably, compared to current methodologies, our methodology delivers an overall performance improvement of 10%. The suggested architecture demonstrates the possibility of effective transfer learning for EEG-based text production, remaining strong and functional even in the face of data limits. This work highlights the potential of integrating LLMs with EEG decoding to improve assistive technologies and improve independence and communication for those with severe motor limitations. Our method pushes the limits of present capabilities and opens new paths for research and application in brain-computer interfaces by efficiently using the strengths of pre-trained language models. This makes EEG-based text production more accessible and efficient.