Foundation model

CEReBrO

From “CEReBrO: Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations Using Efficient Alternating Attention”
PPGECGEEGarXiv preprint
PreprintCatalog paper date: 2025Added to atlas: Oct 26, 2026Source

Activity counts measure attention, not model quality. Missing counts are unknown. Publication status follows the linked source; a listed venue alone does not confirm peer review.

CEReBrO is a compact EEG foundation model (3.58M, 39.95M, and 85.15M parameters) pretrained on the public TUEG scalp-EEG corpus, more than 20,000 hours from more than 10,000 subjects. It is not a PPG-native foundation model. Tóth et al. fine-tune it on 10-second ECG+PPG windows from PulseDB, which is built from MIMIC-III and VitalDB, for cuffless blood pressure. The large unfrozen model at 200 epochs reports DBP/SBP MAE of 1.57/2.72 mmHg on the PulseDB MIMIC-III split and 1.92/3.14 mmHg on VitalDB (Table II).

Signals
PPG, ECG, EEG
Sizes in the CEReBrO tables
3.58M, 39.95M, 85.15M parameters

EEG foundation model pretrained on TUEG; not a PPG-native FM

Transfer paper

ECG+PPG, 10 s at 125 Hz, two channels, head predicts SBP and DBP

PulseDB MIMIC-III, large, unfrozen, 200 epochs: DBP MAE 1.57 mmHg, SBP MAE 2.72 mmHg, BHS A, AAMI pass (Table II)

VitalDB, same setting: DBP MAE 1.92 mmHg, SBP MAE 3.14 mmHg (Table II)

Small model 13.73 MB; Table IV dynamic INT8 3.85 MB, static INT8 3.83 MB (abstract says 13.73 to 3.83 MB)

No code or weight URL in either preprint

At a glance
Type
Foundation model
Modalities
PPGECGEEG
Form factor
Eeg pretrain ECG PPG finetune
Parameters
3.58M, 39.95M, 85.15M
Architecture
Per-channel EEG patch tokens with alternating intra-channel and inter-channel attention; three sizes (small, medium, large)
Venue
arXiv preprint
Year
2025
Code
Not reported
Weights
Not reported
Licence
Not reported
Caveats
Not reported
Added
Oct 26, 2026
Updated
Oct 26, 2026

Abstract

Electroencephalograph (EEG) is a crucial tool for studying brain activity. Recently, self-supervised learning methods leveraging large unlabeled datasets have emerged as a potential solution to the scarcity of widely available annotated EEG data. However, current methods suffer from at least one of the following limitations: i) sub-optimal EEG signal modeling, ii) model sizes in the hundreds of millions of trainable parameters, and iii) reliance on private datasets and/or inconsistent public benchmarks, hindering reproducibility. To address these challenges, we introduce a Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations using alternating attention (CEReBrO), a new small EEG foundation model. Our tokenization scheme represents EEG signals at a per-channel patch granularity. We propose an alternating attention mechanism that jointly models intra-channel temporal dynamics and inter-channel spatial correlations, achieving 2x speed improvement with 6x less memory required compared to standard self-attention. We present several model sizes ranging from 3.6 million to 85 million parameters. Pre-trained on over 20,000 hours of publicly available scalp EEG recordings with diverse channel configurations, our models set new benchmarks in emotion detection and seizure detection tasks, with competitive performance in anomaly classification and gait prediction. This validates our models' effectiveness and efficiency.

Verbatim fromarXiv· arXiv metadata (abstracts are released under CC0)

CEReBrO: ChatPPG research summary card

Key results

1.57
MAE
The large unfrozen model at 200 epochs reports DBP/SBP MAE of 1.57/2.72 mmHg on the PulseDB MIMIC-III split and 1.92/3.14 mmHg on VitalDB…

How it works

How CEReBrO works: Input signals → Foundation model → Downstream tasksInput signals: PPG (Photoplethysmogram); ECG (Electrocardiogram); EEG (Electrophysiology). Datasets: PulseDB v2.0, VitalDB. Foundation model: CEReBrO, 3.58M, 39.95M, 85.15M parameters (Transformer · Masked reconstruction). Downstream tasks: Blood pressure.Input signalsPPG: PhotoplethysmogramPPGPhotoplethysmogramECG: ElectrocardiogramECGElectrocardiogramEEG: ElectrophysiologyEEGElectrophysiologyDatasets: PulseDB v2.0, VitalDBDatasetsPulseDB v2.0, VitalDBFoundation model×NCEReBrO3.58M, 39.95M, 85.15M parametersTransformer · Masked reconstructionDownstream tasksBlood pressureBlood pressure

Datasets linked in the hub; pretraining vs evaluation roles follow the paper.

Pretraining data
TUEG public scalp EEG, over 20,000 hours from over 10,000 subjects
Architecture
Per-channel EEG patch tokens with alternating intra-channel and inter-channel attention; three sizes (small, medium, large)
Inputs
PPG, ECG, EEG
Approach
EEG · PPG · ECG · foundation model · cuffless bp · quantization

Datasets· 2

Papers· 2

Cite

APA

Dimofte, A., Bucagu, G. A., Ingolfsson, T. M., Wang, X., Cossettini, A., Benini, L., & Li, Y. (2025). CEReBrO: Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations Using Efficient Alternating Attention. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.10885

BibTeX

@misc{dimofte2025cerebro,
  title         = {{CEReBrO: Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations Using Efficient Alternating Attention}},
  author        = {Dimofte, Alexandru and Bucagu, Glenn Anta and Ingolfsson, Thorir Mar and Wang, Xiaying and Cossettini, Andrea and Benini, Luca and Li, Yawei},
  year          = {2025},
  howpublished  = {arXiv preprint},
  doi           = {10.48550/arXiv.2501.10885},
  eprint        = {2501.10885},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}

Built from the hub record. Check it against the publisher before submitting.

History

  1. Added to the ChatPPG research hub