[2603.26475] Foundation Model for Cardiac Time Series via Masked Latent Attention

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2603.26475 (cs) [Submitted on 27 Mar 2026] Title:Foundation Model for Cardiac Time Series via Masked Latent Attention Authors:Moritz Vandenhirtz, Samuel Ruipérez-Campillo, Simon Böhi, Sonia Laguna, Irene Cannistraci, Andrea Agostini, Ece Ozkan, Thomas M. Sutter, Julia E. Vogt View a PDF of the paper titled Foundation Model for Cardiac Time Series via Masked Latent Attention, by Moritz Vandenhirtz and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are among the most widely available clinical signals and play a central role in cardiovascular diagnosis. While recent foundation models (FMs) have shown promise for learning transferable ECG representations, most existing pretraining approaches treat leads as independent channels and fail to explicitly leverage their strong structural redundancy. We introduce the latent attention masked autoencoder (LAMAE) FM that directly exploits this structure by learning cross-lead connection mechanisms during self-supervised pretraining. Our approach models higher-order interactions across leads through latent attention, enabling permutation-invariant aggregation and adaptive weighting of lead-specific representations. We provide empirical evidence on the Mimic-IV-ECG database that leveraging the cross-lead connection constitutes an effective form of structural supervision, improving representation quality and transferability. Our method shows strong performance in pr...