Brain Harmony: A Multimodal Foundation Model Unifying Morphology and Function into 1D Tokens
Zijian Dong, Ruilin Li, Joanna Su Xian Chong, Niousha Dehestani, Yinghui Teng, Yi Lin, Zhizhou Li, Yichi Zhang, Yapei Xie, Leon Qi Rong Ooi, B. T. Thomas Yeo, Juan Helen Zhou
Abstract
We present Brain Harmony (BrainHarmonix), the first multimodal brain foundation model that unifies structural morphology and functional dynamics into compact 1D token representations. The model was pretrained on two of the largest neuroimaging datasets to date, encompassing 64,594 T1-weighted structural MRI 3D volumes ( 14 million images) and 70,933 functional MRI (fMRI) time series. BrainHarmonix is grounded in two foundational neuroscience principles: structure complements function - structural and functional modalities offer distinct yet synergistic insights into brain organization; function follows structure - brain functional dynamics are shaped by cortical morphology. The modular pretraining process involves single-modality training with geometric pre-alignment followed by modality fusion through shared brain hub tokens. Notably, our dynamics encoder uniquely handles fMRI time series with heterogeneous repetition times (TRs), addressing a major limitation in existing models. BrainHarmonix is also the first to deeply compress high-dimensional neuroimaging signals into unified, continuous 1D tokens, forming a compact latent space of the human brain. BrainHarmonix achieves strong generalization across diverse downstream tasks, including neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorder classification and cognition prediction - consistently outperforming previous approaches. Our models - pretrained on 8 H100 GPUs - aim to catalyze a new era of AI-driven neuroscience powered by large-scale multimodal neuroimaging.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext ff58e901-c61e-435b-8060-5e2ab3d012dfCited by top-tier papers3
- Omni-fMRI: A Universal Atlas-Free fMRI Foundation ModelMo Wang, Wenhao Ye, Junfeng Xia, Junxiang Zhang et al.ICML 2026 · 7 citations
- Scaling Vision Transformers for Functional MRI with Flat MapsConnor Lane, Mihir Tripathy, Leema K Murali, Ratna Grandhi et al.ICML 2026 · 3 citations
- Stochastic Optimal Control for Continuous-Time fMRI Representation LearningJoonhyeong Park, Byoungwoo Park, Chang-Bae Bang, Jungwon Choi et al.ICLR 2026 · 2 citations
Builds on10
- An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at ScaleAlexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn et al.ICLR 2021 · 21,477 citations
- FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-AwarenessTri Dao, Daniel Y. Fu, Stefano Ermon, Atri Rudra et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 5,493 citations
- FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work PartitioningTri DaoICLR 2024 · 2,600 citations
- Brain Network TransformerXuan Kan, Wei Dai, Hejie Cui, Zilong Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 272 citations
- BrainLM: A foundation model for brain activity recordingsJosue Ortega Caro, Antonio Henrique de Oliveira Fonseca, Syed Asad Rizvi, Matteo Rosati et al.ICLR 2024 · 109 citations
Related papers
- Large Connectome Model: An fMRI Foundation Model of Brain Connectomes Empowered by Brain-Environment Interaction in Multitask Learning LandscapeZiquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Guorong WuAAAI 2026 · 2 citations
- BrainMoE: Cognition Joint Embedding via Mixture-of-Expert Towards Robust Brain Foundation ModelZiquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Tianlong Chen, Guorong WuNeurIPS 2025 · 2 citations
- A Brain Graph Foundation Model: Pre-Training and Prompt-Tuning across Broad Atlases and DisordersXinxu Wei, kanhao zhao, Yong Jiao, Lifang He et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations
- Can Natural Image Autoencoders Compactly Tokenize fMRI Volumes for Long-Range Dynamics Modeling?Peter Yongho Kim, Juhyeon Park, Jungwoo Park, Jubin Choi et al.CVPR 2026 · 1 citation
- BrainOmni: A Brain Foundation Model for Unified EEG and MEG SignalsQinfan Xiao, Ziyun Cui, Chi Zhang, Siqi Chen et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 38 citations
