ODEBrain: Continuous-Time EEG Graph for Modeling Dynamic Brain Networks
Haohui Jia, Zheng Chen, Lingwei Zhu, Rikuto Kotoge, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Yasuko Matsubara, Jimeng Sun, Yasushi Sakurai, Takashi Matsubara

TL;DR
ODEBRAIN introduces a continuous-time neural ODE framework for modeling EEG brain networks, capturing instantaneous nonlinear dynamics and improving forecasting accuracy over traditional discretized methods.
Contribution
It presents a novel Neural ODE-based approach that integrates spectral graph features for continuous and robust modeling of brain network dynamics from EEG data.
Findings
Significantly improves EEG dynamic forecasting accuracy
Enhances robustness and generalization in brain network modeling
Captures instantaneous nonlinear brain activity variations
Abstract
Modeling neural population dynamics is crucial for foundational neuroscientific research and various clinical applications. Conventional latent variable methods typically model continuous brain dynamics through discretizing time with recurrent architecture, which necessarily results in compounded cumulative prediction errors and failure of capturing instantaneous, nonlinear characteristics of EEGs. We propose ODEBRAIN, a Neural ODE latent dynamic forecasting framework to overcome these challenges by integrating spatio-temporal-frequency features into spectral graph nodes, followed by a Neural ODE modeling the continuous latent dynamics. Our design ensures that latent representations can capture stochastic variations of complex brain states at any given time point. Extensive experiments verify that ODEBRAIN can improve significantly over existing methods in forecasting EEG dynamics with…
Peer Reviews
Decision·ICLR 2026 Poster
- The paper writing is generally good although some parts can be further improved. - The idea of using ODE solver in forecasting and predicting graph structure are interesting. - The experimental results are good.
- Some parts are not clear. - No discussion of the computational cost. - No discussion of the architecture of $f_\theta$.
- The paper addresses an important problem that of modeling brain network in continuous time (with NODE). - The novel contributions mainly come from the proposed dual-encoder architecture and objective loss. - The learned dynamic field demonstrate potential for qualitative analyses of brain networks. - The proposed method shows some improvement, especially on TUSZ.
- Several Technical details of the proposed method are not clearly stated / explained. How do the the temporal descriptor \Psi and the objective \Omega are defined? How the pooling of latent continuous trajectory z_t for downstream task is conducted? - The paragraph “RQ3 concerns consistency in the graphs…” seems confusing. From Fig.4 I cannot interpret the similarity scores or similarity matrices from discrete or continuous predictor, and other discussion. It seems the figure misaligned with th
The paper argues discretized, windowed EEG pipelines miss inherently continuous dynamics, motivating a NODE approach and posing concrete challenges (robust initialization; meaningful trajectory objectives). The dual-encoder (graph plus stochastic temporal) initialization and a graph-forecasting head with multi-step loss are well aligned with continuous latent trajectory learning. The forward ODE is standard and the projection aims at future graph prediction, not just signal. Visualizations of
Although the latent dynamics are continuous via NODE, inputs and supervision remain epoched STFT segments and edges are top-k correlations per epoch. The model forecasts at discrete horizons (1s/3s/11s), and training targets are per-epoch graphs. Sensitivity analyses related to top-\tau sparsity and normalized correlations are not reported. The baselines considered are primarily discrete TGNs/transformers. The related-work cites graph ODEs, but the empirical table omits them. NODE solvers ca
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Taxonomy
TopicsFunctional Brain Connectivity Studies · EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces · Neural dynamics and brain function
