BrainEC-LLM: Brain Effective Connectivity Estimation by Multiscale Mixing LLM

Pre-trained Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive advancements in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis and causal discovery. Considering the unique nature of the causal discovery field, which focuses on extracting causal graphs from observed data, research on LLMs in this field is still at an early exploratory stage. As a subfield of causal discovery, effective connectivity (EC) has received even less attention, and LLM-based approaches in EC remain unexplored. Existing LLM-based approaches for causal discovery typically rely on iterative querying to assess the causal influence between variable pairs, without any model adaptation or fine-tuning, making them ill-suited for handling the cross-modal gap and complex causal structures. To this end, we propose BrainEC-LLM, the first method to fine-tune LLMs for estimating brain EC from fMRI data. Specifically, multiscale decomposition mixing module decomposes fMRI time series data into short-term and long-term multiscale trends, then mixing them in bottom-up (fine to coarse) and top-down (coarse to fine) manner to extract multiscale temporal variations. And cross attention is applied with pre-trained word embeddings to ensure consistency between the fMRI input and pre-trained natural language. The experimental results on simulated and real resting-state fMRI datasets demonstrate that BrainEC-LLM can achieve superior performance when compared to state-of-the-art baselines.