EEG-X: Toward Device-Agnostic and Noise-Robust Foundation Models for EEG

Foundation models for EEG analysis are still in their infancy, limited by two key challenges: (1) variability across datasets caused by differences in recording devices and electrode configurations, and (2) the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of EEG, where neural activity is often buried under artifacts and non-brain sources. To address these challenges, we present EEG-X, a device-agnostic and noise-robust foundation model for EEG representation learning. EEG-X introduces a location-based channel embedding that enables robust transfer across heterogeneous EEG devices and electrode layouts. To improve robustness against noise, EEG-X employs a novel noise-aware masking-reconstruction strategy that reconstructs artifact-cleaned signals rather than raw noisy EEG and introduces a novel Dictionary-based Convolutional Transformation (DiCT) that improves reconstruction-based pretraining by comparing signals in a structured feature space instead of directly in the raw signal space. Experiments across datasets collected from diverse EEG devices show that EEG-X consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple downstream tasks and demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization when pretraining and downstream datasets differ in electrode layouts and recording configurations paving the way towards foundation models. The models and code are available at :https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EEG-X-CEDE/README.md