arXiv subjects

Zhizhang Yuan

Publications and source records attributed to Zhizhang Yuan.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BrainWave: A Brain Signal Foundation Model for Clinical Applications

Neural electrical activity is fundamental to brain function, underlying a range of cognitive and behavioral processes, including movement, perception, decision-making, and consciousness. Abnormal patterns of neural signaling often indicate the presence of underlying brain diseases. The variability among individuals, the diverse array of clinical symptoms from various brain disorders, and the limited availability of diagnostic classifications, have posed significant barriers to formulating reliable model of neural signals for diverse application contexts. Here, we present BrainWave, the first foundation model for both invasive and non-invasive neural recordings, pretrained on more than 40,000 hours of electrical brain recordings (13.79 TB of data) from approximately 16,000 individuals. Our analysis show that BrainWave outperforms all other competing models and consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in the diagnosis and identification of neurological disorders. We also demonstrate robust capabilities of BrainWave in enabling zero-shot transfer learning across varying recording conditions and brain diseases, as well as few-shot classification without fine-tuning, suggesting that BrainWave learns highly generalizable representations of neural signals. We hence believe that open-sourcing BrainWave will facilitate a wide range of clinical applications in medicine, paving the way for AI-driven approaches to investigate brain disorders and advance neuroscience research.

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arXiv2026

NeuroSketch: A Practical Design Recipe for Neural Decoding

Neural decoding is fundamental to brain-computer interfaces, with growing applications in healthcare. Previous research has focused on leveraging signal processing and deep learning methods to enhance neural decoding performance. However, systematic guidance on architectural design for neural decoding remains limited. In this study, we develop NeuroSketch, a practical design recipe for neural decoding, through a basic architecture study followed by macro- and micro-level optimization. Comparing nine basic architectures, we find that CNN-2D outperforms other architectures in neural decoding tasks and explore its effectiveness from temporal and spatial perspectives. Building on this backbone, we combine gradual feature-map expansion and early downsampling at the macro level with grouped convolutions at the micro level. These choices form the recipe, which we instantiate as NeuroSketch-Base (1.4M parameters) and NeuroSketch-Large (4.2M parameters). The recipe is developed and evaluated through nearly 5,000 experiments across eight tasks spanning visual, auditory, and speech modalities and EEG, SEEG, and ECoG signals. Against ten baselines, the two variants collectively achieve the best accuracy on each task. Our code is available at https://github.com/Galaxy-Dawn/NeuroSketch.

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arXiv2026

Brain4FMs: A Benchmark of Foundation Models for Electrical Brain Signal

Brain foundation models (BFMs) are advancing neurotechnology by learning transferable representations from neural signals, with broad potential in clinical diagnosis and neuroscience research. Their development relies on large-scale pretraining corpora of electrical brain signals, including scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and intracranial EEG (iEEG). However, existing BFM benchmarks primarily focus on EEG, cover only a limited subset of models, and provide limited analysis beyond downstream performance. We introduce Brain4FMs, the first unified benchmark, to our knowledge, for jointly evaluating BFMs on EEG and iEEG. It integrates 17 representative models and 21 public datasets across clinical diagnosis, sleep staging, communication, and affective computing. Brain4FMs is open and plug-and-play, with dataset-aware preprocessing, cross-subject evaluation, heterogeneous multichannel handling, and standardized downstream adaptation workflows. The benchmark reveals performance variation across tasks, signal modalities, and adaptation protocols, with no single BFM consistently dominating all evaluation scenarios. % To better understand these heterogeneous transfer behaviors, we further conduct exploratory analyses of model-specific properties. To better understand these behaviors, we further conduct exploratory analyses of model-specific properties of spatial, spectral, and discrete representations. The code is available at https://github.com/wajtsq/Brain4FMs.

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arXiv2026

Towards unified brain-to-text decoding across speech production and perception

Speech production and perception are the main ways humans communicate daily. Prior brain-to-text decoding studies have largely focused on a single modality and alphabetic languages. Here, we present a unified brain-to-sentence decoding framework for both speech production and perception in Mandarin Chinese. The framework exhibits strong generalization ability, enabling sentence-level decoding when trained only on single-character data and supporting characters and syllables unseen during training. In addition, it allows direct and controlled comparison of neural dynamics across modalities. Mandarin speech is decoded by first classifying syllable components in Hanyu Pinyin, namely initials and finals, from neural signals, followed by a post-trained large language model (LLM) that maps sequences of toneless Pinyin syllables to Chinese sentences. To enhance LLM decoding, we designed a three-stage post-training and two-stage inference framework based on a 7-billion-parameter LLM, achieving overall performance that exceeds larger commercial LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters or more. In addition, several characteristics were observed in Mandarin speech production and perception: speech production involved neural responses across broader cortical regions than auditory perception; channels responsive to both modalities exhibited similar activity patterns, with speech perception showing a temporal delay relative to production; and decoding performance was broadly comparable across hemispheres. Our work not only establishes the feasibility of a unified decoding framework but also provides insights into the neural characteristics of Mandarin speech production and perception. These advances contribute to brain-to-text decoding in logosyllabic languages and pave the way toward neural language decoding systems supporting multiple modalities.

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arXiv2026

Assembling the Mind's Mosaic: Towards EEG Semantic Intent Decoding

Enabling natural communication through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) remains one of the most profound challenges in neuroscience and neurotechnology. While existing frameworks offer partial solutions, they are constrained by oversimplified semantic representations and a lack of interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Intent Decoding (SID), a novel framework that translates neural activity into natural language by modeling meaning as a flexible set of compositional semantic units. SID is built on three core principles: semantic compositionality, continuity and expandability of semantic space, and fidelity in reconstruction. We present BrainMosaic, a deep learning architecture implementing SID. BrainMosaic decodes multiple semantic units from EEG/SEEG signals using set matching and then reconstructs coherent sentences through semantic-guided reconstruction. This approach moves beyond traditional pipelines that rely on fixed-class classification or unconstrained generation, enabling a more interpretable and expressive communication paradigm. Extensive experiments on multilingual EEG and clinical SEEG datasets demonstrate that SID and BrainMosaic offer substantial advantages over existing frameworks, paving the way for natural and effective BCI-mediated communication.

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arXiv2025

Deep Learning-Powered Electrical Brain Signals Analysis: Advancing Neurological Diagnostics

Neurological disorders pose major global health challenges, driving advances in brain signal analysis. Scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and intracranial EEG (iEEG) are widely used for diagnosis and monitoring. However, dataset heterogeneity and task variations hinder the development of robust deep learning solutions. This review systematically examines recent advances in deep learning approaches for EEG/iEEG-based neurological diagnostics, focusing on applications across 7 neurological conditions using 46 datasets. For each condition, we review representative methods and their quantitative results, integrating performance comparisons with analyses of data usage, model design, and task-specific adaptations, while highlighting the role of pre-trained multi-task models in achieving scalable, generalizable solutions. Finally, we propose a standardized benchmark to evaluate models across diverse datasets and improve reproducibility, emphasizing how recent innovations are transforming neurological diagnostics toward intelligent, adaptable healthcare systems.

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arXiv2024

Brant-X: A Unified Physiological Signal Alignment Framework

Physiological signals serve as indispensable clues for understanding various physiological states of human bodies. Most existing works have focused on a single type of physiological signals for a range of application scenarios. However, as the body is a holistic biological system, the inherent interconnection among various physiological data should not be neglected. In particular, given the brain's role as the control center for vital activities, electroencephalogram (EEG) exhibits significant correlations with other physiological signals. Therefore, the correlation between EEG and other physiological signals holds potential to improve performance in various scenarios. Nevertheless, achieving this goal is still constrained by several challenges: the scarcity of simultaneously collected physiological data, the differences in correlations between various signals, and the correlation differences between various tasks. To address these issues, we propose a unified physiological signal alignment framework, Brant-X, to model the correlation between EEG and other signals. Our approach (1) employs the EEG foundation model to data-efficiently transfer the rich knowledge in EEG to other physiological signals, and (2) introduces the two-level alignment to fully align the semantics of EEG and other signals from different semantic scales. In the experiments, Brant-X achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with task-agnostic and task-specific baselines on various downstream tasks in diverse scenarios, including sleep stage classification, emotion recognition, freezing of gaits detection, and eye movement communication. Moreover, the analysis on the arrhythmia detection task and the visualization in case study further illustrate the effectiveness of Brant-X in the knowledge transfer from EEG to other physiological signals. The model's homepage is at https://github.com/zjunet/Brant-X/.

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