BrainSymphony: A parameter-efficient multimodal foundation model for brain dynamics with limited data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Khajehnejad, Moein, Habibollahi, Forough, Stoliker, Devon, Razi, Adeel
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Khajehnejad, Moein
Habibollahi, Forough
Stoliker, Devon
Razi, Adeel
author_facet Khajehnejad, Moein
Habibollahi, Forough
Stoliker, Devon
Razi, Adeel
contents Foundation models are transforming neuroscience but are often prohibitively large, data-hungry, and difficult to deploy. Here, we introduce BrainSymphony, a lightweight and parameter-efficient foundation model with plug-and-play integration of fMRI time series and diffusion-derived structural connectivity, allowing unimodal or multimodal training and deployment without architectural changes while requiring substantially less data compared to the state-of-the-art. The model processes fMRI time series through parallel spatial and temporal transformer streams, distilled into compact embeddings by a Perceiver module, while a novel signed graph transformer encodes anatomical connectivity from diffusion MRI. These complementary representations are then combined through an adaptive fusion mechanism. Despite its compact design, BrainSymphony consistently outperforms larger models on benchmarks spanning prediction, classification, and unsupervised network discovery. Highlighting the model's generalizability and interpretability, attention maps reveal drug-induced context-dependent reorganization of cortical hierarchies in an independent psilocybin neuroimaging dataset. BrainSymphony delivers accessible, interpretable, and clinically meaningful results and demonstrates that architecturally informed, multimodal models can surpass much larger counterparts and advance applications of AI in neuroscience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18314
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BrainSymphony: A parameter-efficient multimodal foundation model for brain dynamics with limited data
Khajehnejad, Moein
Habibollahi, Forough
Stoliker, Devon
Razi, Adeel
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Neurons and Cognition
Foundation models are transforming neuroscience but are often prohibitively large, data-hungry, and difficult to deploy. Here, we introduce BrainSymphony, a lightweight and parameter-efficient foundation model with plug-and-play integration of fMRI time series and diffusion-derived structural connectivity, allowing unimodal or multimodal training and deployment without architectural changes while requiring substantially less data compared to the state-of-the-art. The model processes fMRI time series through parallel spatial and temporal transformer streams, distilled into compact embeddings by a Perceiver module, while a novel signed graph transformer encodes anatomical connectivity from diffusion MRI. These complementary representations are then combined through an adaptive fusion mechanism. Despite its compact design, BrainSymphony consistently outperforms larger models on benchmarks spanning prediction, classification, and unsupervised network discovery. Highlighting the model's generalizability and interpretability, attention maps reveal drug-induced context-dependent reorganization of cortical hierarchies in an independent psilocybin neuroimaging dataset. BrainSymphony delivers accessible, interpretable, and clinically meaningful results and demonstrates that architecturally informed, multimodal models can surpass much larger counterparts and advance applications of AI in neuroscience.
title BrainSymphony: A parameter-efficient multimodal foundation model for brain dynamics with limited data
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18314