Generalizable, real-time neural decoding with hybrid state-space models

Real-time decoding of neural activity is central to neuroscience and neurotechnology applications, from closed-loop experiments to brain-computer interfaces, where models are subject to strict latency constraints. Traditional methods, including simple recurrent neural networks, are fast and lightweight but often struggle to generalize to unseen data. In contrast, recent Transformer-based approaches leverage large-scale pretraining for strong generalization performance, but typically have much larger computational requirements and are not always suitable for low-resource or real-time settings. To address these shortcomings, we present POSSM, a novel hybrid architecture that combines individual spike tokenization via a cross-attention module with a recurrent state-space model (SSM) backbone to enable (1) fast and causal online prediction on neural activity and (2) efficient generalization to new sessions, individuals, and tasks through multi-dataset pretraining. We evaluate POSSM's decoding performance and inference speed on intracortical decoding of monkey motor tasks, and show that it extends to clinical applications, namely handwriting and speech decoding in human subjects. Notably, we demonstrate that pretraining on monkey motor-cortical recordings improves decoding performance on the human handwriting task, highlighting the exciting potential for cross-species transfer. In all of these tasks, we find that POSSM achieves decoding accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art Transformers, at a fraction of the inference cost (up to 9x faster on GPU). These results suggest that hybrid SSMs are a promising approach to bridging the gap between accuracy, inference speed, and generalization when training neural decoders for real-time, closed-loop applications.