# ZeroMAG: Zero-Shot Multimodal Adapter Generation for Plug-and-Play EEG Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03546/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
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- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [HyperNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09106/) (2016)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Large Brain Model for Learning Generic Representations with Tremendous EEG Data in BCI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18765/) (2024)
- [Parameter-efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning for Transformers via Shared Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04489/) (2021)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [CBraMod: A Criss-Cross Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07236/) (2024)
- [CSBrain: A Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23075/) (2025)
- [Neural Network Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13144/) (2024)
- [SleepFM: Multi-modal Representation Learning for Sleep Across Brain Activity, ECG and Respiratory Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17766/) (2024)
- [Inter-database validation of a deep learning approach for automatic sleep scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10365/) (2020)
- [A Multimodal Approach to Estimating Vigilance Using EEG and Forehead EOG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08492/) (2016)
- [EEG Foundation Models: A Critical Review of Current Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11783/) (2025)
- [CodeBrain: Bridging Decoupled Tokenizer and Multi-Scale Architecture for EEG Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09110/) (2025)
- [Drag-and-Drop LLMs: Zero-Shot Prompt-to-Weights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16406/) (2025)
- [Brant-X: A Unified Physiological Signal Alignment Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00122/) (2024)
- [Towards Robust Multimodal Physiological Foundation Models: Handling Arbitrary Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19596/) (2025)
- [Graph Adapter of EEG Foundation Models for Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16155/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

EEG foundation models (EFMs) capture reusable knowledge from large-scale EEG data, while many EEG recordings also include companion physiological signals that provide complementary information beyond the EEG-only interface. The challenge is to preserve this pretrained knowledge while extending the EFM to heterogeneous multimodal recordings through an adaptation inferred from unlabeled target data. We introduce ZeroMAG, a zero-shot multimodal adapter generation framework that extends a frozen EEG encoder and prediction head using unlabeled target recordings, without target labels or target-side optimization. The target datasets are held out from all model training and selection in the ZeroMAG pipeline. ZeroMAG organizes companion modalities around a configuration-invariant adapter, constructs a modality-subject-task condition from unlabeled recordings and task context, and generates adapter weights in a function-constrained latent space learned from source adapters. Across six held-out target datasets and three EFM backbones, ZeroMAG improves balanced accuracy by 7.22 percentage points over EEG-only inference and 4.89 points over direct weight regression, while coming within 0.50 points of supervised multimodal adaptation on average. Ablations further show that removing functional supervision from either representation learning or conditional generation degrades generated-adapter performance, confirming the contribution of both components.
