Vibe-Spike: An Energy-Preserving EEG Foundation Model Through the Landscape of Neural Coherence

Current foundation models of electroencephalography (EEG) sought to characterize the fluctuations in neural signals, yet this objective stands fundamentally at odds with the intrinsic physiological mechanisms governing brain activity. As with their LLM predecessors, these models pack millions of neurons, even those contributing negligibly small weights, yielding a computational footprint incompatible with resource-constrained portable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). To overcome these challenges, we propose Vibe-Spike, an energy-preserving and biologically-realistic EEG foundation model operating in the regime of oscillatory neural synchronization. Drawing on principles from cognitive neuroscience, our foundation model is designed to recover the masked EEG signals through the transient spikes of spatially coupled neurons, from which self-organized cortical synchronization (aka. brain rhythms) emerges to reciprocally modulate ongoing neural firings. Under the hood, we introduce a macro-micro learning mechanism that bridges two scales of neural computation: lower layers capture neural oscillations via a spiking neural network (SNN), while upper layers model oscillatory synchronization across large neuronal populations, with cross-scale interactions learned end-to-end. Taken together, our Vibe-Spike sheds new light on learning intrinsic representation of functional neural fluctuations. We pre-train the model to reconstruct segmented EEG signals directly from the synchronized spiking representations using a purely self-supervised objective on a diverse corpus of 75 public datasets. To demonstrate its universal representational power, we conduct massive-scale evaluations across ten heterogeneous downstream datasets, including clinical pathology, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment. Vibe-Spike not only facilitates deployment on portable edge devices through its lightweight architecture and energy-preserving inference, but also provides profound neuroscience insights. By further capturing pre- and post-synaptic firing, Vibe-Spike unlocks a new pathway for characterizing effective connectivity and the oscillatory synchronization that underpins cognition.