MVPFormer: A foundation model with multi-variate parallel attention to generate neuronal activity

MVPFormer is a foundation model trained and tested on almost 10,000 hours of iEEG recordings. It can do next-state prediction and, with the addition of classification heads, can also detect seizures.

If your GPU has compute capability > 8.0, i.e., it is Ampere or later, MVPFormer will automatically use the optimised Flash-MVPA; otherwise, it will run with the slower and more memory hungry PyTorch MVPA implementation. Doing inference without Flash-MVPA is supported, while training without Flash-MVPA is not recommended.

Prepare the environment

To prepare the environment for running MVPFormer you need a mixture of pip and compilation from source.

Pip

The requirements.txt file is provided in the repository. Simply install all requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt.

DeepSpeed

You have to compile DeepSpeed manually to activate some necessary extensions. The procedure can vary based on your software and hardware stack, here we report our reference installation steps.

DS_BUILD_FUSED_ADAM=1 DS_BUILD_FUSED_LAMB=1 pip install --no-cache-dir deepspeed --global-option="build_ext" --global-option="-j8"

Inference with MVPFormer

We use PyTorch Lightning to distribute reproducible configuration files for our experiments. The example testing configuration file can be found in the configs folder. You can start testing with:

python main.py test --config configs/mvpformer_classification.yaml --model.init_args.base_model '<base_checkpoint_path>' --model.init_args.head_model '<head_checkpoint_path>' --data.init_args.folder '<dataset_path>' --data.init_args.test_patients ['<dataset_subject>']

Training MVPFormer

We use PyTorch Lightning to distribute reproducible configuration files for our experiments. The example testing configuration file can be found in the configs folder. You can start training with:

python main.py fit --config configs/mvpformer_classification.yaml --model.init_args.base_model '<base_checkpoint_path>' --model.init_args.head_model '<head_checkpoint_path>' --data.init_args.folder '<dataset_path>' --data.init_args.train_patients ['<dataset_subject>']

The example parameters are equivalent to what we have used to train MVPFormer, except in the hardware setup such as the number of GPUs and the number of CPU workers.

Dataset

The SWEC iEEG dataset can be found at this repository hosted by the Hospital of Bern.

Checkpoints

The checkpoints can be downloaded from this location. The checkpoint with base are the base models with only generative pre-training. The swec models are the classification heads.

Disclaimer

This software may only be used for research. For other applications any liability is denied. In particular, the software must not be used for diagnostic purposes.

Citation

@article{carzaniga2025foundation,
  title={A foundation model with multi-variate parallel attention to generate neuronal activity},
  author={Carzaniga, Francesco and Hersche, Michael and Sebastian, Abu and Schindler, Kaspar and Rahimi, Abbas},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.20354},
  year={2025}
}

License

If you would like to see the detailed LICENSE click here.

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# Copyright IBM Corp. 2024 - 2025
# SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
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