Backbone-Informed Adaptation after EEG Pretraining: A Capacity-Controlled Study

arXiv:2611.07192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models learn representations that combine information across channels and time. This structure motivates adapters that model the same relationships during downstream learning. However, it is not clear whether such a design outperforms other candidate adapters. Moreover, in order to arrive at a fair comparison between candidate adapters, we also need to consider their trainable parameters. Here, we ask whether a backbone-informed (native) adapter makes better use of a given capacity by comparing it against a token-wise multilayer perceptron control that transforms each feature vector independently. We approximately match their trainable parameter counts and keep the pretrained encoder fixed.