Brant-X: A Unified Physiological Signal Alignment FrameworkDaoze Zhang, Zhizhang Yuan, Junru Chen et al.
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/.
Con4m: Context-aware Consistency Learning Framework for Segmented Time Series ClassificationJunru Chen, Tianyu Cao, Jing Xu et al.
Time Series Classification (TSC) encompasses two settings: classifying entire sequences or classifying segmented subsequences. The raw time series for segmented TSC usually contain Multiple classes with Varying Duration of each class (MVD). Therefore, the characteristics of MVD pose unique challenges for segmented TSC, yet have been largely overlooked by existing works. Specifically, there exists a natural temporal dependency between consecutive instances (segments) to be classified within MVD. However, mainstream TSC models rely on the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), focusing on independently modeling each segment. Additionally, annotators with varying expertise may provide inconsistent boundary labels, leading to unstable performance of noise-free TSC models. To address these challenges, we first formally demonstrate that valuable contextual information enhances the discriminative power of classification instances. Leveraging the contextual priors of MVD at both the data and label levels, we propose a novel consistency learning framework Con4m, which effectively utilizes contextual information more conducive to discriminating consecutive segments in segmented TSC tasks, while harmonizing inconsistent boundary labels for training. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of Con4m in handling segmented TSC tasks on MVD. The source code is available at https://github.com/MrNobodyCali/Con4m.
Deep Learning-Powered Electrical Brain Signals Analysis: Advancing Neurological DiagnosticsJiahe Li, Xin Chen, Fanqi Shen et al.
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.