arXiv subjects

Xinliang Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Xinliang Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NS-VLA: Towards Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are formulated to ground instructions in visual context and generate action sequences for robotic manipulation. Despite recent progress, VLA models still face structure-blind backbones, backbone-bound generalization, and flat single-objective optimization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language-Action (NS-VLA) framework. It introduces a Neuro-Symbolic Encoder for plan-constrained primitive inference, a Neuro-Symbolic Solver that conditions a backbone-agnostic policy on the active primitive, and Hierarchical Joint Policy Optimization with reward-granularity matching. Experiments on robotic manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that NS-VLA outperforms previous methods in both one-shot training and data-perturbed settings, while simultaneously exhibiting superior zero-shot generalizability and expanded exploration space. Our code is publicly available.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks -- two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains -- we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects underlying brain states, whose activities are distributed across brain regions and manifest as spatial patterns on the scalp. Learning these spatially structured, state-related patterns requires consistent spatial representations across datasets. However, existing EEG foundation models are typically based on self-attention, which does not preserve location-specific information and struggles to align signals recorded with different channel configurations. Moreover, brain states contain both shared and state-specific regional activity, suggesting that learning neurophysiologically plausible, state-aware representations can complement the shared representations targeted by current models and improve downstream decoding. To address these limitations, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that combines a retrieval-based spatial learning mechanism for cross-layout spatial alignment with a brain state-decoupling module that learns both shared and state-specific representations through parallel encoders and region-aware reconstruction. Pre-trained on a large EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine public BCI datasets spanning emotion, motor, speech, stress, mental disease, and attention tasks. Analyses of spatial filters, channel-drop robustness, and encoder contributions further validate the effectiveness of its spatial alignment and state-aware pathways. These results show that BrainPro achieves improved interpretability of learned spatial patterns and produces representations that benefit diverse EEG decoding tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

InA-Probe: Instruction-Aware Active Probing for Time Series Forecasting with LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive potential for time series forecasting. However, existing methods predominantly rely on passive modality alignment or static task reprogramming, which often fail to capture fine-grained, non-stationary temporal patterns or to adapt to nuanced task intents. In this paper, we propose Instruction-aware Active Probing (InA-Probe), which shifts the paradigm from passive alignment toward an active, instruction-driven probing mechanism. Specifically, we design a Multi-Level Instruction Injection mechanism that enriches the model with both global task objectives and fine-grained, patch-level semantic priors. Building on this, an Adaptive Query Generation module produces sample-specific probes that are dynamically modulated by the temporal context. These probes are then refined through a dual-stage attention process: they first internalize task-specific intents via Instruction-Aware Self-Attention, and subsequently interrogate the projected temporal representations through Temporal Cross-Attention to extract salient patterns. Comprehensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks show that InA-Probe consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and LLM-based baselines, excelling in both one-for-all generalization and zero-shot transfer while reducing forecasting error by up to 37\% in challenging cross-domain scenarios. Ablation studies further confirm that the synergy between adaptive querying and fine-grained instructions is key to unlocking the reasoning power of LLMs for complex time series.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

EEG-Based Multimodal Learning via Hyperbolic Mixture-of-Curvature Experts

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multimodal learning integrates brain signals with complementary modalities to improve mental state assessment, providing great clinical potential. The effectiveness of such paradigms largely depends on the representation learning on heterogeneous modalities. For EEG-based paradigms, one promising approach is to leverage their hierarchical structures, as recent studies have shown that both EEG and associated modalities (e.g., facial expressions) exhibit hierarchical structures reflecting complex cognitive processes. However, Euclidean embeddings struggle to represent these hierarchical structures due to their flat geometry, while hyperbolic spaces, with their exponential growth property, are naturally suited for them. In this work, we propose EEG-MoCE, a novel hyperbolic mixture-of-curvature experts framework designed for multimodal neurotechnology. EEG-MoCE assigns each modality to an expert in a learnable-curvature hyperbolic space, enabling adaptive modeling of its intrinsic geometry. A curvature-aware fusion strategy then dynamically weights experts, emphasizing modalities with richer hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that EEG-MoCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, including emotion recognition, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment. Code is available at https://github.com/zhourunhe/EEG-MoCE.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DLink: Distilling Layer-wise and Dominant Knowledge from EEG Foundation Models

EEG foundation models (EFMs) achieve strong cross-subject and cross-task generalization through large-scale pretraining and downstream fine-tuning. Through empirical analysis, we observe that (i) task-adapted EFMs provide strong decoding performance but incur substantial overhead when retained as inference backbones, making knowledge distillation a natural route for optimizing compact students; and (ii) direct distillation from a fixed teacher representation underutilizes EFM knowledge, as task-discriminative information is distributed across intermediate layers rather than concentrated in the final layer. These observations motivate DLink (Distilling Layer-wise and Dominant Knowledge), a spectrally guided distillation framework with input-conditioned layer routing for transferring EFM knowledge into compact students. DLink uses a lightweight router to aggregate teacher layers for each input, and aligns magnitude and phase spectra to mitigate compression-induced spectral distortion in learned representations. The routed teacher knowledge is internalized by a project-then-compress student; the teacher and router are used only during training. Experiments on four EEG benchmarks show that DLink improves matched compact students and remains competitive with lightweight baselines, narrowing the gap to fine-tuned EFMs while substantially reducing parameters, FLOPs, and CPU-only inference latency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Foundation Model Guided Dual-Branch Co-Adaptation for Source-Free EEG Decoding

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) provides a practical solution to cross-subject EEG decoding by adapting source-pretrained models to unlabeled target domains without accessing source data. However, existing SFDA methods rely solely on the limited internal knowledge of source-pretrained models, leading to inferior cross-domain generalization and unreliable pseudo-labels. Although EEG Foundation Models (FMs) pretrained on large-scale data exhibit strong generalizability, their potential in SFDA remains largely unexplored. To this end, we propose FUSED, a Foundation-guided Source-free EEG Decoding framework that integrates a large-scale FM with a compact Specialist Model (SM) via dual-branch co-adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a Co-adaptation mechanism equipping both branches with linear and prototype views, enabling cross-branch pseudo-label generation. Additionally, we design a Consensus Filtering Mechanism that exploits the FM's inherent stability to identify high-quality samples, along with a Two-Stage Pseudo-Label Refinement scheme to suppress error accumulation through cross-branch arbitration. Finally, we calibrate the FM's decision boundaries via mutual information maximization with the SM, followed by knowledge distillation from FM to SM, forming a principled calibrate-then-distill pipeline. To our knowledge, FUSED is the first work to leverage EEG FMs within the SFDA framework for cross-subject EEG decoding. Extensive experiments across three EEG paradigms, including motor imagery, emotion recognition, and SSVEP, demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of foundation-guided synergy for robust and privacy-preserving EEG decoding.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Granulon: Awakening Pixel-Level Visual Encoders with Adaptive Multi-Granularity Semantics for MLLM

Recent advances in multimodal large language models largely rely on CLIP-based visual encoders, which emphasize global semantic alignment but struggle with fine-grained visual understanding. In contrast, DINOv3 provides strong pixel-level perception yet lacks coarse-grained semantic abstraction, leading to limited multi-granularity reasoning. To address this gap, we propose Granulon, a novel DINOv3-based MLLM with adaptive granularity augmentation. Granulon introduces a text-conditioned granularity Controller that dynamically adjusts the visual abstraction level according to the semantic scope of the textual input, and an Adaptive Token Aggregation module that performs granularity-guided pooling and relation-aware clustering to produce compact, semantically rich visual tokens. This design enables unified "pixel-to-fine-to-coarse" reasoning within a single forward pass. Extensive and interpretable experiments demonstrate that Granulon improves accuracy by ~30% and reduces hallucination by ~20%, outperforming all visual encoders under identical settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Graph Neural Networks in EEG-based Emotion Recognition: A Survey

Compared to other modalities, EEG-based emotion recognition can intuitively respond to the emotional patterns in the human brain and, therefore, has become one of the most concerning tasks in the brain-computer interfaces field. Since dependencies within brain regions are closely related to emotion, a significant trend is to develop Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for EEG-based emotion recognition. However, brain region dependencies in emotional EEG have physiological bases that distinguish GNNs in this field from those in other time series fields. Besides, there is neither a comprehensive review nor guidance for constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In the survey, our categorization reveals the commonalities and differences of existing approaches under a unified framework of graph construction. We analyze and categorize methods from three stages in the framework to provide clear guidance on constructing GNNs in EEG-based emotion recognition. In addition, we discuss several open challenges and future directions, such as Temporal full-connected graph and Graph condensation.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Uni-NTFM: A Unified Foundation Model for EEG Signal Representation Learning

Current foundation models for electroencephalography (EEG) rely on architectures adapted from computer vision or natural language processing, typically treating neural signals as pixel grids or token sequences. This approach overlooks that the neural activity is activated by diverse sparse coding across a complex geometric topological cortex. Inspired by biological neural mechanisms, we propose the Unified Neural Topological Foundation Model (Uni-NTFM), an architecture rooted in three core neuroscience principles. In detail, to align with the brain's decoupled coding mechanism, we design the Heterogeneous Feature Projection Module. This module simultaneously encodes both time-domain non-stationary transients and frequency-domain steady-state rhythms, ensuring high quality in both waveform morphology and spectral rhythms. Moreover, we introduce a Topological Embedding mechanism to inject structured spatial priors and align different sensor configurations onto a unified latent functional topography, effectively reconstructing the geometry of brain regions. Furthermore, we achieve functional modularization and sparse coding efficiency of biological networks by constructing the Mixture-of-Experts Transformer network. This dynamic routing mechanism assigns different signal patterns and tasks to specialized neural subnetworks, and effectively preventing task interference while increasing the model capacity to record-breaking 1.9 billion parameters. Uni-NTFM is pre-trained on a diverse corpus comprising 28,000 hours of EEG data, and outperforms existing models across nine distinct downstream tasks under both linear probing and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating that aligning model architecture with neural mechanisms is significant to learn universal representations and achieve generalizable brain decoding. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Uni-NTFM-0924.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

EEG-DLite: Dataset Distillation for Efficient Large EEG Model Training

Large-scale EEG foundation models have shown strong generalization across a range of downstream tasks, but their training remains resource-intensive due to the volume and variable quality of EEG data. In this work, we introduce EEG-DLite, a data distillation framework that enables more efficient pre-training by selectively removing noisy and redundant samples from large EEG datasets. EEG-DLite begins by encoding EEG segments into compact latent representations using a self-supervised autoencoder, allowing sample selection to be performed efficiently and with reduced sensitivity to noise. Based on these representations, EEG-DLite filters out outliers and minimizes redundancy, resulting in a smaller yet informative subset that retains the diversity essential for effective foundation model training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that training on only 5 percent of a 2,500-hour dataset curated with EEG-DLite yields performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, training on the full dataset across multiple downstream tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of pre-training data distillation in the context of EEG foundation models. EEG-DLite provides a scalable and practical path toward more effective and efficient physiological foundation modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/t170815518/EEG-DLite.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

EEG-MedRAG: Enhancing EEG-based Clinical Decision-Making via Hierarchical Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

With the widespread application of electroencephalography (EEG) in neuroscience and clinical practice, efficiently retrieving and semantically interpreting large-scale, multi-source, heterogeneous EEG data has become a pressing challenge. We propose EEG-MedRAG, a three-layer hypergraph-based retrieval-augmented generation framework that unifies EEG domain knowledge, individual patient cases, and a large-scale repository into a traversable n-ary relational hypergraph, enabling joint semantic-temporal retrieval and causal-chain diagnostic generation. Concurrently, we introduce the first cross-disease, cross-role EEG clinical QA benchmark, spanning seven disorders and five authentic clinical perspectives. This benchmark allows systematic evaluation of disease-agnostic generalization and role-aware contextual understanding. Experiments show that EEG-MedRAG significantly outperforms TimeRAG and HyperGraphRAG in answer accuracy and retrieval, highlighting its strong potential for real-world clinical decision support. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yi9206413-boop/EEG-MedRAG.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Fuzzy Information Evolution with Three-Way Decision in Social Network Group Decision-Making

In group decision-making (GDM) scenarios, uncertainty, dynamic social structures, and vague information present major challenges for traditional opinion dynamics models. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel social network group decision-making (SNGDM) framework that integrates three-way decision (3WD) theory, dynamic network reconstruction, and linguistic opinion representation. First, the 3WD mechanism is introduced to explicitly model hesitation and ambiguity in agent judgments, thereby preventing irrational decisions. Second, a connection adjustment rule based on opinion similarity is developed, enabling agents to adaptively update their communication links and better reflect the evolving nature of social relationships. Third, linguistic terms are used to describe agent opinions, allowing the model to handle subjective, vague, or incomplete information more effectively. Finally, an integrated multi-agent decision-making framework is constructed, which simultaneously considers individual uncertainty, opinion evolution, and network dynamics. The proposed model is applied to a multi-UAV cooperative decision-making scenario, where simulation results and consensus analysis demonstrate its effectiveness. Experimental comparisons further verify the advantages of the algorithm in enhancing system stability and representing realistic decision-making behaviors.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ECHO: Toward Contextual Seq2Seq Paradigms in Large EEG Models

Electroencephalography (EEG), with its broad range of applications, necessitates models that can generalize effectively across various tasks and datasets. Large EEG Models (LEMs) address this by pretraining encoder-centric architectures on large-scale unlabeled data to extract universal representations. While effective, these models lack decoders of comparable capacity, limiting the full utilization of the learned features. To address this issue, we introduce ECHO, a novel decoder-centric LEM paradigm that reformulates EEG modeling as sequence-to-sequence learning. ECHO captures layered relationships among signals, labels, and tasks within sequence space, while incorporating discrete support samples to construct contextual cues. This design equips ECHO with in-context learning, enabling dynamic adaptation to heterogeneous tasks without parameter updates. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that, even with basic model components, ECHO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art single-task LEMs in multi-task settings, showing superior generalization and adaptability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Introducing Multimodal Paradigm for Learning Sleep Staging PSG via General-Purpose Model

Sleep staging is essential for diagnosing sleep disorders and assessing neurological health. Existing automatic methods typically extract features from complex polysomnography (PSG) signals and train domain-specific models, which often lack intuitiveness and require large, specialized datasets. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new paradigm for sleep staging that leverages large multimodal general-purpose models to emulate clinical diagnostic practices. Specifically, we convert raw one-dimensional PSG time-series into intuitive two-dimensional waveform images and then fine-tune a multimodal large model to learn from these representations. Experiments on three public datasets (ISRUC, MASS, SHHS) demonstrate that our approach enables general-purpose models, without prior exposure to sleep data, to acquire robust staging capabilities. Moreover, explanation analysis reveals our model learned to mimic the visual diagnostic workflow of human experts for sleep staging by PSG images. The proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy and robustness, highlighting its efficiency and practical value for medical applications. The code for the signal-to-image pipeline and the PSG image dataset will be released.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Interpretable and Robust AI in EEG Systems: A Survey

The close coupling of artificial intelligence (AI) and electroencephalography (EEG) has substantially advanced human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies in the AI era. Different from traditional EEG systems, the interpretability and robustness of AI-based EEG systems are becoming particularly crucial. The interpretability clarifies the inner working mechanisms of AI models and thus can gain the trust of users. The robustness reflects the AI's reliability against attacks and perturbations, which is essential for sensitive and fragile EEG signals. Thus the interpretability and robustness of AI in EEG systems have attracted increasing attention, and their research has achieved great progress recently. However, there is still no survey covering recent advances in this field. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey and summarize the interpretable and robust AI techniques for EEG systems. Specifically, we first propose a taxonomy of interpretability by characterizing it into three types: backpropagation, perturbation, and inherently interpretable methods. Then we classify the robustness mechanisms into four classes: noise and artifacts, human variability, data acquisition instability, and adversarial attacks. Finally, we identify several critical and unresolved challenges for interpretable and robust AI in EEG systems and further discuss their future directions.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Brain Foundation Models: A Survey on Advancements in Neural Signal Processing and Brain Discovery

Brain foundation models (BFMs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in computational neuroscience, offering a revolutionary framework for processing diverse neural signals across different brain-related tasks. These models leverage large-scale pre-training techniques, allowing them to generalize effectively across multiple scenarios, tasks, and modalities, thus overcoming the traditional limitations faced by conventional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches in understanding complex brain data. By tapping into the power of pretrained models, BFMs provide a means to process neural data in a more unified manner, enabling advanced analysis and discovery in the field of neuroscience. In this survey, we define BFMs for the first time, providing a clear and concise framework for constructing and utilizing these models in various applications. We also examine the key principles and methodologies for developing these models, shedding light on how they transform the landscape of neural signal processing. This survey presents a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in BFMs, covering the most recent methodological innovations, novel views of application areas, and challenges in the field. Notably, we highlight the future directions and key challenges that need to be addressed to fully realize the potential of BFMs. These challenges include improving the quality of brain data, optimizing model architecture for better generalization, increasing training efficiency, and enhancing the interpretability and robustness of BFMs in real-world applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SelectiveFinetuning: Enhancing Transfer Learning in Sleep Staging through Selective Domain Alignment

In practical sleep stage classification, a key challenge is the variability of EEG data across different subjects and environments. Differences in physiology, age, health status, and recording conditions can lead to domain shifts between data. These domain shifts often result in decreased model accuracy and reliability, particularly when the model is applied to new data with characteristics different from those it was originally trained on, which is a typical manifestation of negative transfer. To address this, we propose SelectiveFinetuning in this paper. Our method utilizes a pretrained Multi Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (MRCNN) to extract EEG features, capturing the distinctive characteristics of different sleep stages. To mitigate the effect of domain shifts, we introduce a domain aligning mechanism that employs Earth Mover Distance (EMD) to evaluate and select source domain data closely matching the target domain. By finetuning the model with selective source data, our SelectiveFinetuning enhances the model's performance on target domain that exhibits domain shifts compared to the data used for training. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing baselines, offering greater robustness and adaptability in practical scenarios where data distributions are often unpredictable.

eess.SP↗