SpecBraM: What Should an EEG Foundation Model Predict? Masked Band-Power Prediction versus Waveform Reconstruction

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised EEG models often reconstruct masked waveforms or predict discrete codes. We study a task-aligned alternative: masked band-power prediction (MBP), which predicts fixed narrow-band log spectral energy for masked channel-time patches. This target retains rhythm power relevant to sleep staging while avoiding phase-sensitive waveform reconstruction and a learned codebook. Across three pretraining seeds, we compare band-power and waveform