# SiamQuality: A ConvNet-Based Foundation Model for Imperfect Physiological Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17667 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17667/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [Understanding How Dimension Reduction Tools Work: An Empirical Approach to Deciphering t-SNE, UMAP, TriMAP, and PaCMAP for Data Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04456/) (2020)
- [VLP: A Survey on Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09061/) (2022)
- [PPGnet: Deep Network for Device Independent Heart Rate Estimation from Photoplethysmogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08912/) (2019)
- [BeliefPPG: Uncertainty-aware Heart Rate Estimation from PPG signals via Belief Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07730/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Physiology-Aware Masked Cross-Modal Reconstruction for Biosignal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00973/) (2026)
- [HiPPT: Physiology-Grounded Wearable PPG Representation Learning via Multi-Scope Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14489/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models, especially those using transformers as backbones, have gained significant popularity, particularly in language and language-vision tasks. However, large foundation models are typically trained on high-quality data, which poses a significant challenge, given the prevalence of poor-quality real-world data. This challenge is more pronounced for developing foundation models for physiological data; such data are often noisy, incomplete, or inconsistent. The present work aims to provide a toolset for developing foundation models on physiological data. We leverage a large dataset of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals from hospitalized intensive care patients. For this data, we propose SimQuality, a novel self-supervised learning task based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as the backbone to enforce representations to be similar for good and poor quality signals that are from similar physiological states. We pre-trained the SimQuality on over 36 million 30-second PPG pairs and then fine-tuned and tested on six downstream tasks using external datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach on all the downstream tasks, which are extremely important for heart monitoring on wearable devices. Our method indicates that CNNs can be an effective backbone for foundation models that are robust to training data quality.