EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models (2508.17742v1)

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models are poised to significantly advance brain signal analysis by learning robust representations from large-scale, unlabeled datasets. However, their rapid proliferation has outpaced the development of standardized evaluation benchmarks, which complicates direct model comparisons and hinders systematic scientific progress. This fragmentation fosters scientific inefficiency and obscures genuine architectural advancements. To address this critical gap, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for the systematic and standardized evaluation of EEG foundation models (EEG-FMs). Our contributions are threefold: (1) we curate a diverse suite of downstream tasks and datasets from canonical EEG paradigms, implementing standardized processing and evaluation protocols within a unified open-source framework; (2) we benchmark prominent state-of-the-art foundation models to establish comprehensive baseline results for a clear comparison of the current landscape; (3) we perform qualitative analyses of the learned representations to provide insights into model behavior and inform future architectural design. Through extensive experiments, we find that fine-grained spatio-temporal feature interaction, multitask unified training and neuropsychological priors would contribute to enhancing model performance and generalization capabilities. By offering a unified platform for fair comparison and reproducible research, EEG-FM-Bench seeks to catalyze progress and guide the community toward the development of more robust and generalizable EEG-FMs. Code is released at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.