Large Language Models for EEG: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 2, 2025
Abstract
The growing convergence between Large Language Models (LLMs) and
electroencephalography (EEG) research is enabling new directions in neural
decoding, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and affective computing. This
survey offers a systematic review and structured taxonomy of recent
advancements that utilize LLMs for EEG-based analysis and applications. We
organize the literature into four domains: (1) LLM-inspired foundation models
for EEG representation learning, (2) EEG-to-language decoding, (3) cross-modal
generation including image and 3D object synthesis, and (4) clinical
applications and dataset management tools. The survey highlights how
transformer-based architectures adapted through fine-tuning, few-shot, and
zero-shot learning have enabled EEG-based models to perform complex tasks such
as natural language generation, semantic interpretation, and diagnostic
assistance. By offering a structured overview of modeling strategies, system
designs, and application areas, this work serves as a foundational resource for
future work to bridge natural language processing and neural signal analysis
through language models.