# A Language-Guided Multimodal Foundation Model for Zero-Shot and Multi-Task Brain Signal Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15740/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
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- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
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- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
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- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
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- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [Large Brain Model for Learning Generic Representations with Tremendous EEG Data in BCI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18765/) (2024)
- [CBraMod: A Criss-Cross Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07236/) (2024)
- [SeqSleepNet: End-to-End Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network for Sequence-to-Sequence Automatic Sleep Staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10932/) (2018)
- [The Temple University Hospital Seizure Detection Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08085/) (2018)
- [Improved EEG Event Classification Using Differential Energy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02477/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Brain signal analysis is essential for both neuroscience research and clinical diagnostics, yet current approaches face critical limitations. End-to-end models require task-specific retraining and exhibit limited generalization, while pre-trained models lack semantic depth and still depend on extensive fine-tuning. Meanwhile, general-purpose multimodal foundation models, though powerful in other domains, struggle to interpret brain signals due to representational misalignment and lack of domain knowledge. This study introduces a multimodal foundation model for zero-shot and multi-task brain signal analysis (METIS) through a unified language-signal alignment framework. METIS is pretrained on the largest and most diverse brain-signal corpus to date, comprising over 70,000 h of recordings from more than 11,000 subjects across 20 datasets. In a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation across 12 datasets, METIS outperformed the leading generalist model by over 20.9% in average accuracy. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, METIS's performance matches or exceeds that of supervised, task-specific models. Furthermore, METIS demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and strong generalization, achieving an average AUROC advantage of over 16.0% in few-shot settings and 15.9% in cross-dataset transfer. This work establishes a new paradigm for general-purpose brain signal analysis, paving the way for next-generation neurotechnology.