Logit Averaging During Training Sets a New State of the Art for Non-Invasive Speech BCI

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces are in practice limited by signal-to-noise ratio, and recent state-of-the-art methods address this limitation by aggregating over repeated trials of the same stimulus. Yet multi-trial aggregation has been treated inconsistently across the literature: some work averages brain signals at the model's input, other work averages predictions at the model's output, and neither treats aggregation as an architectural choice in its own right. We provide the first systematic comparison of aggregation strategies for non-invasive neural decoding, evaluating six paradigms (including logit averaging during training and three attention-based variants we introduce) across three datasets, four tasks, and two group sizes. We find that aggregation choice matters substantially: training-time logit averaging, the simplest method we propose, outperforms all others in 6 of 7 settings. On the phoneme classification setting of the 2025 PNPL competition, it sets a new state of the art, significantly outperforming the competition winner by 17.4 absolute percentage points in balanced accuracy. We further draw a theoretical connection between logit averaging and joint ensemble training, which has been shown to underperform independent ensembling in the deep learning literature; our results call into question recent explanations of why joint ensemble training fails. Together, these findings establish multi-trial aggregation as a key design choice for non-invasive neural decoding and identify training-time logit averaging as a simple, effective default.

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Authors

Miran Özdogan; Gereon Elvers; Michael Bronstein; Oiwi Parker Jones

Published

Oct 19, 2026

Paper type

preprint

Source

Arxiv