Stochastic Optimal Control for Continuous-Time fMRI Representation Learning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission15175 Authors

Keywords: self-supervised learning, neural differential equations, irregular time-series, fMRI

TL;DR: We formulate fMRI representation learning as a stochastic optimal control problem over continuous-time latent dynamics, unifying SSL objectives (MAE, JEPA) into a scalable framework that yields robust and compact representations.

Abstract: Learning robust representations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is fundamentally challenged by the temporal irregularity and noise inherent in data from heterogeneous sources. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods often discard critical temporal information by discretizing or averaging fMRI signals. To address this, we introduce a novel framework that reframes SSL as a Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) problem. Our approach models brain activity as continuous-time latent dynamics, learning a robust representation of brain dynamics by optimizing a control policy that is agnostic to the temporal irregularity. This SOC framework naturally unifies masked autoencoding (MAE) and joint-embedding prediction (JEPA) to extract compact, control-derived representations. Furthermore, a simulation-free inference strategy ensures computational efficiency and scalability for large-scale fMRI datasets. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream applications, highlighting the potential of the SOC-based continuous-time representation learning framework.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 15175