Beyond Accuracy: Robustness, Interpretability and Expressiveness of EEG Foundation Models

Abstract

EEG foundation models (EEG-FMs) have been evaluated predominantly on clean, in-distribution accuracy, demonstrating modest gains over supervised baselines and weak frozen representations. This study examines whether these conclusions hold beyond clean accuracy by evaluating six EEG-FMs and a supervised baseline across ten datasets along three layers of analysis: (i) Robustness: we apply test-time perturbations including additive noise, random and region-based channel dropout and region-specific noise injection. Our analyses show that no single model dominates all failure modes. The most noise-robust model is among the most fragile under channel dropout and much of the dropout fragility disappears when channels are removed rather than zero-padded. (ii) Interpretability: using attribution methods in EEG-FMs, we show that models broadly concentrate relevance on task-appropriate brain regions consistent with known neurophysiology. (iii) Expressiveness: we demonstrate that the poor head-only performance previously attributed to low-quality pre-trained representations is largely explained by the pooling strategy and that EEG-FMs possess sufficient representational capacity when their token-level embeddings are preserved. Furthermore, with block-wise probing and attention analysis we show that late blocks are repurposed during fine-tuning, while early blocks already hold task-related information. Our results show that conclusions about EEG-FMs depend on evaluation choices and we recommend that future evaluation of EEG-FMs should report robustness per perturbation type, produce attribution maps and examine multiple pooling strategies.