Foundation Models for the Brain and Body
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop

Saturday, December 6th, 2025 | Upper Level Room 24ABC | San Diego, California

Workshop Description

Our brains and bodies speak a rich and complex biological language of neural and physiological signals, a language that AI models are increasingly capable of deciphering as large-scale datasets become available. Recent advances in brain interfacing and wearable technologies, including EEG, intracortical electrophysiology, EMG, MEG, and ECG, have enabled the broad collection of these signals across real-world contexts and diverse populations. This growing wealth of data is driving a shift toward foundation models: large-scale, pretrained AI systems designed to learn from biosignals and generalize across diverse downstream applications, from brain-computer interfacing to health monitoring.

Realizing this potential, however, requires addressing the unique challenges that come with biosignal timeseries: they are noisy, heterogeneous, and collected under variable conditions across subjects, devices, and environments. To meet these challenges, this workshop brings together neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, wearable tech researchers, and machine learning experts advancing foundation model approaches. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, we aim to catalyze the next generation of AI models that can capture the complexity of the brain, body, and behavior at scale.

How to Attend

This is a NeurIPS 2025 workshop. Registration is required through the official NeurIPS conference website. Make sure to check the "Workshops & Competitions" session when registering.

Register on the NeurIPS Website

Invited Speakers

Hubert Banville
Hubert Banville

Meta

Juan Helen Zhou
Juan Helen Zhou

National University of Singapore

Cuntai Guan
Cuntai Guan

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Guillermo Sapiro
Guillermo Sapiro

Apple, Princeton University

Tom Oxley
Tom Oxley

Synchron

Eva Dyer
Eva Dyer

University of Pennsylvania

Organizers

Mehdi Azabou
Mehdi Azabou

Columbia, ARNI

Cole Hurwitz
Cole Hurwitz

Columbia University

Sophia Sanborn
Sophia Sanborn

Stanford University

Sana Tonekaboni
Sana Tonekaboni

MIT, Harvard

Paul Scotti
Paul Scotti

Sophont, Princeton

Nanda H Krishna
Nanda H Krishna

Mila

Pierre Guetschel
Pierre Guetschel

Donders Institute

Steering Committee

Alexandre Gramfort
Alexandre Gramfort

Meta

Liam Paninski
Liam Paninski

Columbia University

Blake Richards
Blake Richards

Mila

Schedule

December 6th, 2025 - NeurIPS Workshop Day

8:50 - 9:00

Introduction & Opening Remarks

Mehdi Azabou, Cole Hurwitz

Session I: Modeling Brain-Wide Activity with Imaging and EEG

9:00 - 9:30

Towards generalizable brain decoders with EEG foundation models

Hubert Banville (Meta)
9:30 - 10:00

Interpretable Brain Dynamics Foundation Models for vision decoding and behavioral outcome prediction

Juan Helen Zhou (National University of Singapore)
10:00 - 10:15

Spotlight Talks

3 contributed talks (5 mins each)

  • Mitigating Subject Dependency in EEG Decoding with Subject-Specific Low-Rank Adapters
    Timon Klein, Piotr Minakowski, Sebastian Sager
  • A scalable self-supervised method for modeling human intracranial recordings during natural behavior
    Shivashriganesh P. Mahato, Jingyun Xiao, Alexandre Andre, Geeling Chau, Wenrui Ma, Ian Jarratt Knight, Duy Nguyen, Lawrence Jianqiao Hu, Bingni W Brunton, Michael S. Beauchamp, Bijan Pesaran, Sergey A. Shuvaev, Eva L Dyer
  • EEG Foundation Challenge 2025 winner
Selected Contributors
10:15 - 11:45

Poster Session I + Demo Session I

Contributed Works + Live Demos

11:45 - 13:00

Break

Session II: Modeling Physiological and Wearable Signals

13:00 - 13:30

Multimodal Physiological Foundation Models to Handle Arbitrary Missing Modalities

Cuntai Guan (Nanyang Technological University)
13:30 - 14:00

Are you aging healthy? Are you eating properly? Wearable-augmented foundations models have the answer

Guillermo Sapiro (Apple, Princeton University)
14:00 - 14:15

Spotlight Talks

3 contributed talks (5 mins each)

  • NeuroMamba: A State-Space Foundation Model for Functional MRI
    Jubin Choi, David Keetae Park, Junbeom Kwon, Shinjae Yoo, Jiook Cha
  • Processing fMRI Brain Signals Using Latents from Natural Image Autoencoders
    Juhyeon Park, Peter Yongho Kim, Jungwoo Park, Jubin Choi, Jungwoo Seo, Jiook Cha, Taesup Moon
  • CPEP: Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training Enhances Gesture Generalization on EMG signals
    Wenhui Cui, Christopher Michael Sandino, Hadi Pouransari, Ran Liu, Juri Minxha, Ellen L. Zippi, Aman Verma, Anna Sedlackova, Behrooz Mahasseni, Erdrin Azemi
Selected Contributors

Session III: Modeling the Brain at Single-Neuron Resolution

14:15 - 14:45

Embracing Complexity: Foundation Models and the Data-Driven Future of Neuroscience

Eva Dyer (University of Pennsylvania)
14:45 - 15:15

Towards foundation models of human cognition through scalable brain computer interfaces

Tom Oxley (Synchron)
15:15 - 15:30

Coffee Break

15:30 - 15:45

Spotlight Talks

3 contributed talks (5 mins each)

  • Unified Pretraining on Mixed Optophysiology and Electrophysiology Data Across Brain Regions
    Ian Jarratt Knight, Vinam Arora, Mehdi Azabou, Eva L Dyer
  • A Sensing Whole Brain Zebrafish Foundation Model for Neuron Dynamics and Behavior
    Sam Fatehmanesh, Matt Thomson, James Gornet, David Prober
  • Human Sensory-Musculoskeletal Modeling and Control of Whole-Body Movements
    Chenhui Zuo, Guohao lin, Chen Zhang, Shanning Zhuang, Yanan Sui
Selected Contributors
15:45 - 17:00

Poster Session II + Demo Session II

Contributed Works + Live Demos

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