Title: NeuroRVQ: Multi-Scale EEG Tokenization for Generative Large Brainwave Models
Primary area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science
Keywords: Foundation Models, Large Brainwave Foundation Models, Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) captures neural activity across multiple temporal and spectral scales, yielding signals that are rich but complex for representation learning.  Recently, EEG foundation models trained to predict masked signal-tokens have shown promise
for learning generalizable representations. However, their performance is hindered by their signal tokenization modules. Existing neural tokenizers fail to preserve high-frequency dynamics, limiting their ability to reconstruct EEG signals with high fidelity. We introduce NeuroRVQ, a scalable Large Brainwave Model (LBM)  centered  on a codebook-based tokenizer. Our tokenizer integrates: (i) multi-scale feature extraction modules that capture the full frequency neural spectrum; (ii) hierarchical residual vector quantization (RVQ) codebooks for high-resolution encoding; and, (iii) an EEG signal phase- and amplitude-aware loss function for efficient training. This design enables efficient EEG compression while supporting accurate reconstruction across all frequency bands, leading to robust generative masked modeling. Our empirical results demonstrate that NeuroRVQ achieves lower reconstruction error and outperforms existing LBMs on a variety of downstream tasks. More broadly, NeuroRVQ tokenizer establishes a strong prior for codebook-based general-purpose brainwave models, enabling advances in neural decoding, generative modeling and multimodal biosignal integration.