UniBCI: Towards a Unified Pretrained Model for Invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces

TL;DR

UniBCI introduces a unified pretrained model for invasive brain-computer interfaces that effectively captures neural signals across diverse conditions, improving generalization and efficiency in neural data analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unified model with a new tokenization scheme, attention mechanism, and self-supervised learning for invasive neural data, enabling scalable and transferable representations.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks.

Balances accuracy with lower inference latency and fewer parameters.

Demonstrates robustness across species, subjects, and brain regions.

Abstract

Modeling invasive neural spike data is fundamental to advancing high-performance brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, existing approaches face critical challenges, including limited-scale heterogeneous data, cross-domain distribution shift, and the intrinsic spatiotemporal complexity of invasive neural signals. In this work, we propose UniBCI, a unified pretrained model for invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces. The model integrates three key components: (1) a context-conditioned spatio-temporal tokenization (CST) scheme that embeds neural signals together with metadata into a shared representation space; (2) a hierarchical Interval-Area Attention (IAA) mechanism that captures patterns of spike dynamics in slots via linear attention and locality dependencies via sliding-window attention; and (3) a scalable self-supervised masked signals reconstruction objective for learning generalizable neural representations from large-scale unlabeled data. We construct a pretraining corpus spanning multiple species, subjects, brain regions, and behavioral experiment paradigms. These heterogeneous recordings are standardize via our proposed unified normalization and tokenization. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that UniBCI achieves SOTA performance across diverse downstream tasks while improving generalization. Moreover, the model achieves a strong balance between accuracy and efficiency, with fewer trainable parameters and lower inference latency. These results suggest that UniBCI provides a practical step toward general-purpose neural foundation models, enabling robust, scalable, and transferable representation learning for invasive neural data. The code for this paper is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniBCI-C805.