# PulseLM: A Foundation Dataset and Benchmark for PPG-Text Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03331 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03331/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ECG-QA: A Comprehensive Question Answering Dataset Combined With Electrocardiogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15681/) (2023)
- [SensorLM: Learning the Language of Wearable Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09108/) (2025)
- [Pulse-PPG: An Open-Source Field-Trained PPG Foundation Model for Wearable Applications Across Lab and Field Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01108/) (2025)
- [Teach Multimodal LLMs to Comprehend Electrocardiographic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19008/) (2024)
- [WildPPG: A Real-World PPG Dataset of Long Continuous Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17540/) (2024)
- [Q-Heart: ECG Question Answering via Knowledge-Informed Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06296/) (2025)
- [An Accurate Non-accelerometer-based PPG Motion Artifact Removal Technique using CycleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11512/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive PPG-based Dataset for HR/HRV Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18165/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CardioState-JEPA: Delay-Aware Cross-Modal Learning of a Shared Cardiac Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12944/) (2026)
- [PPG-LM: A Photoplethysmography-Language Model with Multi-Level Clinical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33516/) (2026)
- [HiPPT: Physiology-Grounded Wearable PPG Representation Learning via Multi-Scope Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14489/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a widely used non-invasive sensing modality for continuous cardiovascular and physiological monitoring across clinical, laboratory, and wearable settings. While existing PPG datasets support a broad range of downstream tasks, they typically provide supervision in the form of numerical measurements or task-specific labels, limiting their compatibility with language-based interfaces and multimodal foundation models. In this work, we introduce PulseLM, a large-scale PPG-text question-answering dataset that bridges raw PPG waveforms and natural language through a unified question-answering (QA) formulation. PulseLM aggregates PPG recordings from sixteen publicly available sources and harmonizes heterogeneous annotations into 12 downstream tasks. The dataset comprises over 1 million standardized 10-second PPG segments, associated with nearly 2.5 million question-answer pairs. We further define reproducible data pipeline, training, and evaluation protocols and establish baseline benchmarks using multimodal PPG-aware large language models. PulseLM provides a standardized foundation for studying language-grounded physiological inference, cross-dataset generalization, and scalable benchmarking of PPG-based multimodal models. We publicly release the dataset and code at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Manhph2211/PulseLM and https://github.com/manhph2211/PULSE-LM, respectively.