BrainFedFM is a structural brain MRI foundation model that was federatively pretrained on 164,707 3‑D scans from 42 sites using a dual‑priority approach that emphasizes informative anatomical regions locally and prioritizes site contributions globally. The model outperformed seven baseline models—including four centralized foundation models—across 20 downstream tasks (classification, regression, segmentation), achieving a mean rank of 1.68 and a 50% performance gain, especially in classification and regression and among underrepresented populations. These results demonstrate the model’s generalizability and show that federated pretraining can effectively develop neuroimaging foundation models without pooling raw images.
By Zhen Yu, Yang Liu, Xiahai Zhuang, Qingchao Chen
BrainWideBench is a benchmark that evaluates across‑animal transfer on multi‑region neural recordings from 139 mice, covering 276 brain regions. It comprises three task suites—behavior decoding, neural activity prediction, and anatomical organization recovery—to test whether learned representations support diverse downstream objectives. The benchmark shows that while pretraining improves performance over single‑session baselines, current methods vary in transfer ability and none perform uniformly well across all suites, highlighting the challenge of developing general‑purpose neural representations.
By Alexandre Andre, Shivashriganesh P. Mahato, Vinam Arora, Keshav Balaji, Divyansha Lachi, Nanda H. Krishna, Jingyun Xiao, Yizi Zhang, Ximeng Mao, Wenrui Ma, Han Yu, International Brain Laboratory, Daniel Birman, Niccol\`o Bonacchi, Gaelle A. Chapuis, Joana A. Catarino, Felicia Davatolhagh, Mayo Faulkner, Laura Freitas-Silva, Fei Hu, Julia M. Huntenburg, Anup Khanal, In\^es Laranjeira, Petrina Lau, Guido T. Meijer, Nathaniel J. Miska, Jean-Paul Noel, Alejandro Pan-Vazquez, Georg Raiser, Cyrille Rossant, Karolina Z. Socha, Anne E. Urai, Miles J. Wells, Steven J. West, Olivier Winter, Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Cole Hurwitz, Mehdi Azabou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Eva L. Dyer
The study investigates whether a compact, supervised 3D CNN pretrained for brain‑age prediction can act as a reusable foundation model for various Alzheimer's‑related neuroimaging tasks. By freezing the 7.18 million weights and adding only ~1 % of trainable parameters via Low‑Rank Adaptation, the model achieved high performance across six experiments, including dementia classification, MCI progression prediction, amyloid positivity detection, and volume estimation of hippocampal and white matter hypointensities. The results demonstrate that the pretrained brain‑age model generalizes well to new datasets without retraining, offering a data‑efficient alternative to larger networks.
By Reza Rajabli, D. Louis Collins
arXiv:2606. 04010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Brain foundation models (BFMs) are self-supervised Transformers pretrained on fMRI data.
By Giovanni Marraffini, Gabriel Mahuas, Trinidad Borrell, Victoria Shevchenko, Demian Wassermann
The study investigates how data volume, model size, and training duration affect the performance of fMRI foundation models. Using over 200 datasets and 10,000 GPU‑hours, the authors find that larger models benefit more from additional data, and that at a fixed compute budget, increasing data yields greater gains than enlarging the model. By selecting optimal combinations of data, size, and duration, they produce models that outperform existing fMRI foundation models on out‑of‑distribution tasks while requiring less pretraining compute.
By Wenhao Ye, Xuanye Pan, Junfeng Xia, Junxiang Zhang, Mo Wang, Quanying Liu
arXiv:2601. 17883v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (FMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for brain-computer interfaces, aiming to learn transferable neural representations from large-scale heterogeneous recordings.
By Dingkun Liu, Yuheng Chen, Zhu Chen, Zhenyao Cui, Yaozhi Wen, Jiayu An, Jingwei Luo, Dongrui Wu
arXiv:2508. 17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress.
By Wei Xiong, Jiangtong Li, Jie Li, Kun Zhu, Changjun Jiang
arXiv:2607. 06629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Brain age -- the age inferred from a physiological recording -- is an emerging biomarker whose deviation from chronological age tracks neurological and psychiatric burden, and EEG is an attractive substrate for it because it is cheap, portable, and temporally rich.
By Roy Segal, Yoni Svechinsky, Tomer Fekete
arXiv:2607. 03522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning a single low-rank adapter on many domains at once is multi-task learning: the domains must be co-learned, and how they share the adapter decides whether they help or hurt one another.
By Wei Zhang, Lin Tang, Ming Zhao, Yuxuan Wang
arXiv:2608.24597v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used window into human brain function, but most EEG models remain tied to a one-dataset-one-model supervised...
By Yulong Dou, Han Wu, Guo Chen, Fangmao Ju, Zhiming Cui, Dinggang Shen
The paper investigates combining a domain‑specific self‑supervised task—voxel‑level brain age prediction—with a general task—image inpainting—to pretrain models for brain MRI segmentation. A multitask pretraining framework jointly optimizes both objectives, yielding representations that outperform single‑task pretraining and training from scratch on three segmentation benchmarks (multiple sclerosis lesions, ischemic stroke lesions, and cortical structures). The study demonstrates that integrating domain‑specific and general self‑supervised tasks benefits the development of generalizable neuroimaging foundation models.
By Tasneem Nasser, Susanne Schmid, Roberto Souza, Naser El-Sheimy
arXiv:2607. 17782v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models pretrained using self-supervised learning have transformed computer vision by learning transferable representations from large-scale unlabeled data.
By Moona Mazher, Abdul Qayyum, Steven A. Niederer, Daniel C. Alexander