Diffusion-Guided Pretraining for Brain Graph Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wei, Xinxu, Zhou, Rong, He, Lifang, Zhang, Yu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Wei, Xinxu
Zhou, Rong
He, Lifang
Zhang, Yu
author_facet Wei, Xinxu
Zhou, Rong
He, Lifang
Zhang, Yu
contents With the growing interest in foundation models for brain signals, graph-based pretraining has emerged as a promising paradigm for learning transferable representations from connectome data. However, existing contrastive and masked autoencoder methods typically rely on naive random dropping or masking for augmentation, which is ill-suited for brain graphs and hypergraphs as it disrupts semantically meaningful connectivity patterns. Moreover, commonly used graph-level readout and reconstruction schemes fail to capture global structural information, limiting the robustness of learned representations. In this work, we propose a unified diffusion-based pretraining framework that addresses both limitations. First, diffusion is designed to guide structure-aware dropping and masking strategies, preserving brain graph semantics while maintaining effective pretraining diversity. Second, diffusion enables topology-aware graph-level readout and node-level global reconstruction by allowing graph embeddings and masked nodes to aggregate information from globally related regions. Extensive experiments across multiple neuroimaging datasets with over 25,000 subjects and 60,000 scans involving various mental disorders and brain atlases demonstrate consistent performance improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_09437
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion-Guided Pretraining for Brain Graph Foundation Models
Wei, Xinxu
Zhou, Rong
He, Lifang
Zhang, Yu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
With the growing interest in foundation models for brain signals, graph-based pretraining has emerged as a promising paradigm for learning transferable representations from connectome data. However, existing contrastive and masked autoencoder methods typically rely on naive random dropping or masking for augmentation, which is ill-suited for brain graphs and hypergraphs as it disrupts semantically meaningful connectivity patterns. Moreover, commonly used graph-level readout and reconstruction schemes fail to capture global structural information, limiting the robustness of learned representations. In this work, we propose a unified diffusion-based pretraining framework that addresses both limitations. First, diffusion is designed to guide structure-aware dropping and masking strategies, preserving brain graph semantics while maintaining effective pretraining diversity. Second, diffusion enables topology-aware graph-level readout and node-level global reconstruction by allowing graph embeddings and masked nodes to aggregate information from globally related regions. Extensive experiments across multiple neuroimaging datasets with over 25,000 subjects and 60,000 scans involving various mental disorders and brain atlases demonstrate consistent performance improvements.
title Diffusion-Guided Pretraining for Brain Graph Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09437