# Behavioral Latency as Weak Event-Time Supervision for EEG Reaction-Time Decoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29428/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [Large Brain Model for Learning Generic Representations with Tremendous EEG Data in BCI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18765/) (2024)
- [BENDR: using transformers and a contrastive self-supervised learning task to learn from massive amounts of EEG data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12037/) (2021)
- [Label Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.6027/) (2014)
- [REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG -- Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21585/) (2025)
- [Transfer Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Euclidean Space Data Alignment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05464/) (2018)
- [A Scalable Discrete-Time Survival Model for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00917/) (2018)
- [Effective Ways to Build and Evaluate Individual Survival Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11347/) (2018)
- [Medformer: A Multi-Granularity Patching Transformer for Medical Time-Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19363/) (2024)
- [EEGFormer: Towards Transferable and Interpretable Large-Scale EEG Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10278/) (2024)
- [Transfer Learning in Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00296/) (2015)
- [EEG Foundation Challenge: From Cross-Task to Cross-Subject EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19141/) (2025)
- [DOSED: a deep learning approach to detect multiple sleep micro-events in EEG signal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04079/) (2018)
- [BrainGPT: Unleashing the Potential of EEG Generalist Foundation Model by Autoregressive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19779/) (2024)
- [The Third Pillar of Causal Analysis? A Measurement Perspective on Causal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17708/) (2025)
- [EEG-Based User Reaction Time Estimation Using Riemannian Geometry Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08533/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-trial EEG analyses are often organized around events and latencies, yet EEG-based reaction-time (RT) prediction is posed as scalar regression on a fixed stimulus-locked window. RT is treated as a window-level label rather than timing evidence about response-relevant dynamics. Here we reformulate trial-wise RT decoding as event-time posterior modeling. Instead of predicting RT directly, the model estimates a posterior over response-relevant event times, p(teventmid X), and uses its mean as the RT estimate. This treats behavioral latency as a weak observation of latent response-relevant timing. We evaluate this formulation on the Healthy Brain Network contrast change detection EEG task under a subject-disjoint, release-separated protocol. Across five seeds, distributional event-time supervision consistently improves held-out RT prediction relative to scalar regression and temporal-readout controls. Controlled objective comparisons isolate supervision of the event-time distribution, rather than expectation-based readout alone, as the source of this gain. Architecture controls show that the effect persists across four temporal backbones and is not explained by model scale. Beyond point prediction, posterior geometry characterizes concentration, target alignment, and interval behavior, while observation-noise calibration separates latent concentration from predictive uncertainty over RT. Shifted-crop inference probes shortcut use versus temporal localization. Matched shift-jitter improves robustness, increases mean sensitivity, and moves predictions more often in the expected crop-relative direction. Sensitivity remains below ideal crop-relative localization, leaving a clear equivariance gap. Together, these results establish event-time posterior modeling as a probabilistic and interpretable formulation for linking single-trial EEG dynamics to behavioral timing.