# Neural Autoregressive Modeling of Brain Aging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [Generative AI for Medical Imaging: extending the MONAI Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15208/) (2023)
- [SADM: Sequence-Aware Diffusion Model for Longitudinal Medical Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08228/) (2022)
- [Equitable modelling of brain imaging by counterfactual augmentation with morphologically constrained 3D deep generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14923/) (2021)
- [Degenerative Adversarial NeuroImage Nets for Brain Scan Simulations: Application in Ageing and Dementia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01526/) (2019)
- [Degenerative Adversarial NeuroImage Nets: Generating Images that Mimic Disease Progression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02787/) (2019)
- [Brain Latent Progression: Individual-based Spatiotemporal Disease Progression on 3D Brain MRIs via Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08560/) (2025)
- [A model of brain morphological changes related to aging and Alzheimer's disease from cross-sectional assessments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09826/) (2019)

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

- [Anatomically Guided Latent Diffusion for Brain MRI Progression Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14584/) (2026)
- [Progression as Latent Drift: Generative Forecasting of Slow-Evolving Pathologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08270/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Brain aging synthesis is a critical task with broad applications in clinical and computational neuroscience. The ability to predict the future structural evolution of a subject's brain from an earlier MRI scan provides valuable insights into aging trajectories. Yet, the high-dimensionality of data, subtle changes of structure across ages, and subject-specific patterns constitute challenges in the synthesis of the aging brain. To overcome these challenges, we propose NeuroAR, a novel brain aging simulation model based on generative autoregressive transformers. NeuroAR synthesizes the aging brain by autoregressively estimating the discrete token maps of a future scan from a convenient space of concatenated token embeddings of a previous and future scan. To guide the generation, it concatenates into each scale the subject's previous scan, and uses its acquisition age and the target age at each block via cross-attention. We evaluate our approach on both the elderly population and adolescent subjects, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art generative models, including latent diffusion models (LDM) and generative adversarial networks, in terms of image fidelity. Furthermore, we employ a pre-trained age predictor to further validate the consistency and realism of the synthesized images with respect to expected aging patterns. NeuroAR significantly outperforms key models, including LDM, demonstrating its ability to model subject-specific brain aging trajectories with high fidelity.