# GPT-PPG: A GPT-based Foundation Model for Photoplethysmography Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08015 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08015/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [MOMENT: A Family of Open Time-series Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03885/) (2024)
- [LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05961/) (2024)
- [TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04948/) (2023)
- [TimeGPT-1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03589/) (2023)
- [Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05409/) (2023)
- [PaPaGei: Open Foundation Models for Optical Physiological Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20542/) (2024)
- [Frozen Language Model Helps ECG Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12311/) (2023)
- [TROIKA: A General Framework for Heart Rate Monitoring Using Wrist-Type Photoplethysmographic Signals During Intensive Physical Exercise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5181/) (2014)
- [EarthPT: a time series foundation model for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07207/) (2023)
- [Estimating Blood Pressure from Photoplethysmogram Signal and Demographic Features using Machine Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03357/) (2020)
- [RRWaveNet: A Compact End-to-End Multi-Scale Residual CNN for Robust PPG Respiratory Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08672/) (2022)
- [BeliefPPG: Uncertainty-aware Heart Rate Estimation from PPG signals via Belief Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07730/) (2023)
- [Log-Spectral Matching GAN: PPG-based Atrial Fibrillation Detection can be Enhanced by GAN-based Data Augmentation with Integration of Spectral Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05272/) (2021)
- [Sparse learned kernels for interpretable and efficient medical time series processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05385/) (2023)
- [Learning From Alarms: A Robust Learning Approach for Accurate Photoplethysmography-Based Atrial Fibrillation Detection using Eight Million Samples Labeled with Imprecise Arrhythmia Alarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03333/) (2022)
- [SQUWA: Signal Quality Aware DNN Architecture for Enhanced Accuracy in Atrial Fibrillation Detection from Noisy PPG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15353/) (2024)
- [SiamAF: Learning Shared Information from ECG and PPG Signals for Robust Atrial Fibrillation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09203/) (2023)
- [A Self-Supervised Algorithm for Denoising Photoplethysmography Signals for Heart Rate Estimation from Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05339/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [SIGMA-PPG: Statistical-prior Informed Generative Masking Architecture for PPG Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21031/) (2026)
- [QualityFM: a Multimodal Physiological Signal Foundation Model with Self-Distillation for Signal Quality Challenges in Critically Ill Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06516/) (2025)
- [Estimating Clinical Lab Test Result Trajectories from PPG using Physiological Foundation Model and Patient-Aware State Space Model -- a UNIPHY+ Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16345/) (2025)
- [FairTune: A Bias-Aware Fine-Tuning Framework Towards Fair Heart Rate Prediction from PPG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16491/) (2025)
- [Generalist vs Specialist Time Series Foundation Models: Investigating Potential Emergent Behaviors in Assessing Human Health Using PPG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14254/) (2025)
- [CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15284/) (2026)
- [Wav2Arrest 2.0: Long-Horizon Cardiac Arrest Prediction with Time-to-Event Modeling, Identity-Invariance, and Pseudo-Lab Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21695/) (2025)
- [BioX-Bridge: Model Bridging for Unsupervised Cross-Modal Knowledge Transfer across Biosignals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02276/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Inference-Time Augmentation Framework in Physiological Signals: Application to PPG-Based AF Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10410/) (2026)
- [Large language models in medical time series analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22262/) (2026)
- [PPG-LM: A Photoplethysmography-Language Model with Multi-Level Clinical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33516/) (2026)
- [RAE-PPG: Duration-Grounded Retain-and-Extend Pretraining for PPG Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36794/) (2026)
- [LiteEMG-FM: An Efficient and Deployable Foundation Model for Robust EMG Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02497/) (2026)
- [HiPPT: Physiology-Grounded Wearable PPG Representation Learning via Multi-Scope Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14489/) (2026)
- [TEX-MEX: Similarity-Guided Temporal Contrastive Learning for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19557/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study introduces a novel application of a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model tailored for photoplethysmography (PPG) signals, serving as a foundation model for various downstream tasks. Adapting the standard GPT architecture to suit the continuous characteristics of PPG signals, our approach demonstrates promising results. Our models are pre-trained on our extensive dataset that contains more than 200 million 30s PPG samples. We explored different supervised fine-tuning techniques to adapt our model to downstream tasks, resulting in performance comparable to or surpassing current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in tasks like atrial fibrillation detection. A standout feature of our GPT model is its inherent capability to perform generative tasks such as signal denoising effectively, without the need for further fine-tuning. This success is attributed to the generative nature of the GPT framework.