# Behavioral Pretraining

Neural motor decoding has long depended on invasive paired neural-behavioral recordings, while unpaired behavioral data is cheaper and easier to scale. BeeMO decouples the behavior decoder from the neural encoder: the decoder first learns movement dynamics from behavioral trajectories, and neural activity enters through cross-attention only when available. Across intracortical motor datasets in nonhuman primates, adding 6.5 hours of unpaired behavior made BeeMO-POYO significantly better than POYO on random-target reaching and on isometric wrist, and behavior-only pretrained BeeMO-POYO matched POYO pretrained on 32 neural sessions.

Neural motor decoding has long depended on invasive paired neural-behavioral recordings, while unpaired behavioral data is cheaper and easier to scale. BeeMO decouples the behavior decoder from the neural encoder: the decoder first learns movement dynamics from behavioral trajectories, and neural activity enters through cross-attention only when available. Across intracortical motor datasets in nonhuman primates, adding 6.5 hours of unpaired behavior made BeeMO-POYO significantly better than POYO on random-target reaching and on isometric wrist, and behavior-only pretrained BeeMO-POYO matched POYO pretrained on 32 neural sessions.