BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique for recording brain electrical activity, widely used in brain-computer interface (BCI) and healthcare. Recent EEG foundation models trained on large-scale datasets have shown improved performance and generalizability over traditional decoding methods, yet significant challenges remain. Existing models often fail to explicitly capture channel-to-channel and region-to-region interactions, which are critical sources of information inherently encoded in EEG signals. Due to varying channel configurations across datasets, they either approximate spatial structure with self-attention or restrict training to a limited set of common channels, sacrificing flexibility and effectiveness. Moreover, although EEG datasets reflect diverse brain states such as emotion, motor, and others, current models rarely learn state-aware representations during self-supervised pre-training. To address these gaps, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that introduces a retrieval-based spatial learning block to flexibly capture channel- and region-level interactions across varying electrode layouts, and a brain state-decoupling block that enables state-aware representation learning through parallel encoders with decoupling and region-aware reconstruction losses. This design allows BrainPro to adapt seamlessly to diverse tasks and hardware settings. Pre-trained on an extensive EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization across nine public BCI datasets. Our codes and the pre-trained weights will be released.