NeuroOnline: Bridging Pretraining and Online Adaptation for EEG Foundation Models

Weibin Li, Wendu Li, Yushan You, Chen Wei, Quanying Liu

EEG foundation models have shown strong potential in learning generalized representations across subjects and tasks. However, most existing approaches follow a pretraining-static deployment paradigm, which suffers from two key limitations: (1) misalignment between pretraining objectives and downstream tasks, and (2) limited adaptability to distribution shifts in online settings. We propose Online Neural Adaptation (NeuroOnline), a unified framework that enables continuous adaptation in online scenarios. NeuroOnline integrates two complementary mechanisms: (1) multi-view consistency learning, which enforces cross-view alignment to promote consistent and task-relevant representations, and (2) context-aware representation modulation, which leverages a learnable context prompt with cross-attention to dynamically adapt representations to evolving data distributions. Together, these mechanisms unify representation alignment and dynamic adaptation. Experiments on multiple EEG benchmarks show that NeuroOnline consistently outperforms strong baselines in online settings, achieving better performance under distribution shifts. Ablation and sensitivity studies further validate the necessity of each component and the effectiveness of the overall design.