AREION: A Foundation Model for Atlas-Agnostic Representation Learning of Brain Connectome

Abstract

Brain foundation models have shown promising advances in learning generalizable representations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. However, existing models are typically tied to specific brain atlases and cannot be applied to fMRI data represented using different atlases without full retraining, thereby severely limiting their broader utility across neuroimaging studies. To address this bottleneck, we introduce AREION, atlas-agnostic representation learning of brain connectomes. AREION overcomes atlas dependency through two integrated innovations. First, a Brain Region Contextualizing technique maps brain regions and connectivity entries from diverse atlases into a unified representation space based on their spatial, functional, and morphological characteristics. Second, a Hierarchical Brain Transformer Encoder processes region-specific connectivity profiles as variable-length token sequences and jointly captures local functional structure and global brain functional organization, conditioned on brain regional context, without assuming a fixed number of regions. Together, these two techniques enable the learning of generalizable representations across brain atlases with different parcellation resolutions and connectivity dimensions. AREION is pretrained on a large-scale multi-atlas cohort of fMRI data via self-supervised modeling and evaluated across diverse downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that it outperforms strong supervised baselines and fMRI foundation models while using substantially fewer parameters, demonstrating strong transferability to atlases unseen during pretraining, generalization to external datasets, and excellent interpretability at the brain regional level.