EEG-PRIME: Prototype-Aligned Representation Learning with Multi-Level Conditioning for EEG Decoding

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models often generalize poorly across datasets and subjects due to domain shifts in acquisition protocols and individual neurophysiology. We propose EEG-PRIME, a two-stage EEG foundation model for cross-dataset multi-task decoding. EEG-PRIME combines masked pretraining with prototype-aligned instruction tuning to enable instruction-aware and subject-invariant decoding across diverse BCI paradigms. During pretraining, an EEG encoder learns transferable representations through masked reconstruction with frequency-cutoff spectral augmentation. During instruction tuning, EEG-PRIME incorporates task-semantic, dataset-specific, and subject-invariant conditioning. The resulting conditioning signal modulates the Q-Former through Layer-wise Query Modulation, while frozen text embeddings of class labels serve as prototypes for cosine-similarity-based prediction across heterogeneous label spaces. Experiments on sixteen datasets covering motor imagery, emotion recognition, ADHD detection, covert speech, and mental workload show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines and prior EEG foundation models under cross-subject settings. On two additional held-out datasets, EEG-PRIME achieves balanced accuracy comparable to within-session calibration models without target-domain optimization, calibration, or linear probing, demonstrating promising zero-shot transfer capability.