# RAICL: Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Vision-Language-Model Based EEG Seizure Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17844 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17844/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [In-Context Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00083/) (2023)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [Active Example Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04486/) (2022)
- [What Makes Good Examples for Visual In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13670/) (2023)
- [EEG-Deformer: A Dense Convolutional Transformer for Brain-computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00719/) (2024)
- [Exploring Large-Scale Language Models to Evaluate EEG-Based Multimodal Data for Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07313/) (2024)
- [DBConformer: Dual-Branch Convolutional Transformer for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21140/) (2025)
- [An Automated Classifier of Harmful Brain Activities for Clinical Usage Based on a Vision-Inspired Pre-trained Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08874/) (2025)
- [EEG-VLM: A Hierarchical Vision-Language Model with Multi-Level Feature Alignment and Visually Enhanced Language-Guided Reasoning for EEG Image-Based Sleep Stage Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19155/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding is a critical component of medical diagnostics, rehabilitation engineering, and brain-computer interfaces. However, contemporary decoding methodologies remain heavily dependent on task-specific datasets to train specialized neural network architectures. Consequently, limited data availability impedes the development of generalizable large brain decoding models. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift from conventional signal-based decoding by leveraging large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to analyze EEG waveform plots. By converting multivariate EEG signals into stacked waveform images and integrating neuroscience domain expertise into textual prompts, we demonstrate that foundational VLMs can effectively differentiate between different patterns in the human brain. To address the inherent non-stationarity of EEG signals, we introduce a Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning (RAICL) approach, which dynamically selects the most representative and relevant few-shot examples to condition the autoregressive outputs of the VLM. Experiments on EEG-based seizure detection indicate that state-of-the-art VLMs under RAICL achieved better or comparable performance with traditional time series based approaches. These findings suggest a new direction in physiological signal processing that effectively bridges the modalities of vision, language, and neural activities. Furthermore, the utilization of off-the-shelf VLMs, without the need for retraining or downstream architecture construction, offers a readily deployable solution for clinical applications.