# ECG-RAMBA: Zero-Shot ECG Generalization by Morphology-Rhythm Disentanglement and Long-Range Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23347 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23347/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [ROCKET: Exceptionally fast and accurate time series classification using random convolutional kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13051/) (2019)
- [MINIROCKET: A Very Fast (Almost) Deterministic Transform for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08791/) (2020)
- [Automatic diagnosis of the 12-lead ECG using a deep neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01949/) (2019)
- [ECG-FM: An Open Electrocardiogram Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05178/) (2024)
- [EEG-SSM: Leveraging State-Space Model for Dementia Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17801/) (2024)
- [TolerantECG: A Foundation Model for Imperfect Electrocardiogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09887/) (2025)
- [Empirical investigation of multi-source cross-validation in clinical ECG classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15012/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EEG-Titans: Long-Horizon Seizure Forecasting via Dual-Branch Attention and Neural Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13748/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning has achieved strong performance for electrocardiogram (ECG) classification within individual datasets, yet dependable generalization across heterogeneous acquisition settings remains a major obstacle to clinical deployment and longitudinal monitoring. A key limitation of many model architectures is the implicit entanglement of morphological waveform patterns and rhythm dynamics, which can promote shortcut learning and amplify sensitivity to distribution shifts. We propose ECG-RAMBA, a framework that separates morphology and rhythm and then re-integrates them through context-aware fusion. ECG-RAMBA combines: (i) deterministic morphological features extracted by MiniRocket, (ii) global rhythm descriptors computed from heart-rate variability (HRV), and (iii) long-range contextual modeling via a bi-directional Mamba backbone. To improve sensitivity to transient abnormalities under windowed inference, we introduce a numerically stable Power Mean pooling operator (Q=3) that emphasizes high-evidence segments while avoiding the brittleness of max pooling and the dilution of averaging. We evaluate under a protocol-faithful setting with subject-level cross-validation, a fixed decision threshold, and no test-time adaptation. On the Chapman--Shaoxing dataset, ECG-RAMBA achieves a macro ROC-AUC ≈ 0.85. In zero-shot transfer, it attains PR-AUC =0.708 for atrial fibrillation detection on the external CPSC-2021 dataset, substantially outperforming a comparable raw-signal Mamba baseline, and shows consistent cross-dataset performance on PTB-XL. Ablation studies indicate that deterministic morphology provides a strong foundation, while explicit rhythm modeling and long-range context are critical drivers of cross-domain robustness.