arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

BrainCodes: A Lightweight EEG Foundation Model over Discrete Neural Codes

BrainCodes is a lightweight EEG foundation model that uses a quantization-based neural tokenizer and a spatiotemporal encoder to learn transferable EEG features from over 800 hours of data across more than 1,000 participants. The model is pretrained with a self‑supervised objective that encourages spatial connectivity and sensitivity to narrowband neural oscillations, enabling it to match or surpass state‑of‑the‑art performance on tasks such as sleep staging, attention assessment, and cognitive load estimation. It achieves these results while using up to 97% fewer trainable parameters, making it suitable for low‑resource wearable devices, and its evaluation framework analyzes the geometry and invariances of the learned representations.

By Kleanthis Avramidis, Ivan Tashev, Dimitra Emmanouilidou