Effect of auxiliary cross-paradigm data on paradigm-specific EEG foundation model pre-training

Determine whether incorporating EEG recordings from paradigms other than the target paradigm as auxiliary data during pre-training enhances the downstream performance of paradigm-specific EEG foundation models on that target paradigm.

Background

The paper compares general-purpose EEG foundation models with a paradigm-specific model (MIRepNet) on motor imagery tasks and finds that the paradigm-specific model achieves state-of-the-art results, supporting the value of task-focused pre-training.

Building on this observation, the authors argue that paradigm-specific pre-training is a promising direction for practical BCI deployment, but they note uncertainty about whether adding data from other paradigms during pre-training could further help or hinder performance. This raises a concrete open question about the role of cross-paradigm data in paradigm-specific model development.

References

Furthermore, whether auxiliary data from other paradigms can enhance pre-training for a target paradigm remains an open question worthy of further investigation.

— EEG Foundation Models: Progresses, Benchmarking, and Open Problems  (2601.17883 - Liu et al., 25 Jan 2026) in Section 6.1 Paradigm-Specific Foundation Models (Discussion)

Whether a model trained on such a proxy task can transfer to spontaneous inner monologue remains an open question.

— Decoding silent reading from non-invasive EEG  (2608.20186 - Marquardt et al., 20 Aug 2026) in Section 5.3, “What this does and does not imply for inner speech”