cs.LGMay 28, 2026

Prior-Guided Frequency-Calibrated Virtual EEG Channel Inference from Four Frontal Electrodes for Wearable EEG Augmentation

Authors: Minghao Xiao

Organizations: School of Biomedical Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 511442, China · School of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China

Abstract

Low-channel wearable electroencephalography (EEG) is attractive for long-term monitoring, but four frontal electrodes provide only a sparse and spatially biased sampling of the scalp potential field. Virtual-channel methods should therefore be framed not as recovery of independent unmeasured brain activity, but as prior-guided conditional inference of posterior predictive scalp-potential representations at target electrode locations. We present FAVC-Net, a compact frequency-calibrated virtual-channel inference network that estimates 13 target channels from Fp1, Fp2, F7, and F8. The model combines shared multi-scale source encoding, source-state embeddings, target-conditioned signed source-block mixing, GATv2-based attention refinement, attention-consistent skip fusion, and weak Welch power spectral density calibration. The generator is trained as a task-agnostic reconstruction module, without class-label, classification, or CSP-like discriminative constraints, so that the virtual montage remains tied to conditional scalp-potential estimation rather than to a specific downstream decision. On the PRED+CT dataset, FAVC-Net achieved the best joint waveform-spectral operating point among neural and interpolation baselines. Its time-domain gains were modest, whereas log-spectral distance and PSD KL divergence were reduced by 30.50% and 38.94% relative to the strongest non-FAVC comparator. Under wearable-like source perturbations, the model preserved spectral fidelity and channel-frequency texture, with anti-collapse benefits most evident under EMG-like bursts and mixed stress. These results support virtual EEG channels as montage-compatible, frequency-calibrated posterior predictive representations derived from sparse frontal measurements, not as independent substitutes for physically recorded electrodes.

Explore similar work

CardsList
Jun 12, 2026eess.SP

Coordinate-Queryable Neural Field Reconstruction for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution with Unseen-Electrode Generation

EEG spatial super-resolution (EEGSR) in real deployments is challenged by random channel missingness, unstable electrode quality, and changing visible-channel patterns caused by bad contacts or device variability. Most existing EEGSR methods learn a fixed low-to-high channel mapping under pre-defined input-output layouts, which makes them brittle when missing channels vary at test time. In this paper, we reformulate EEGSR as learning a shared conditional scalp field from partially observed support channels. Specifically, a position-guided encoder summarizes the observed EEG channels and their coordinates into a latent condition, and a conditional implicit neural representation decoder reconstructs target EEG signals by querying this condition at desired electrode coordinates. During inference, the model directly reconstructs unseen electrode signals from the available EEG support and the queried coordinates. To strengthen the constraint of the encoded latent representation on the decoder and thereby construct a more stable scalp field consistent with the observed channels, we further introduce a fidelity-preserving channel corruption training strategy under mixed electrode states. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for both random missing-channel reconstruction and strict unseen-electrode signal generation. Notably, under the strict held-out-electrode setting on AAD, our method reduces NMSE by 37.5% and improves SNR by 2.12 dB over the strongest baseline, showing its ability to synthesize signals at electrode locations never exposed during training.
Hongjun Liu, Leyu Zhou, Zijianghao Yang +1
Electroencephalogram
AskPDF
May 24, 2026cs.LG

BandVQ: Band-Wise Vector-Quantized EEG Foundation Model

A central challenge in electroencephalography (EEG) foundation modeling is learning transferable representations across recordings with diverse tasks, montages, references, and spectral characteristics. Existing masked modeling approaches often rely on broadband continuous patches or a single discrete representation, which may underrepresent frequency-specific activity. This paper proposes BandVQ, a band-wise vector-quantized EEG foundation model that decomposes EEG into delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands, trains an independent VQ-VAE tokenizer for each band, and pretrains a shared Transformer encoder on the resulting discrete VQ code indices. The encoder uses masked code tokens, quantized absolute log-power tokens, channel and temporal embeddings, and metadata prefix tokens representing reference, band, task family, and phase. Region-based masking is also introduced to reduce the trivial reconstruction of spatially adjacent electrodes. The model is pretrained on 71 public EEG corpora comprising over 9,200 subjects and 357,000 single-channel hours and evaluated on six subject-independent classification datasets. Under the current evaluation setting, the proposed model achieves strong transfer performance, with the highest reported results on three cognitive tasks and competitive performance on three motor imagery tasks.
Jamiyan Sukhbaatar, Satoshi Imamura, Toshihisa Tanaka
Electroencephalography Foundation ModelsCalibration-Free Low-Bit Vector QuantizationTransformer EncoderWireless Foundation Models
AskPDF
Apr 25, 2026cs.LG

Channel Adaptation for EEG Foundation Models: A Systematic Benchmark Across Architectures, Tasks, and Training Regimes

Scaling EEG foundation models requires pooling data across heterogeneous electrode montages, a prerequisite both for larger pretraining corpora and for downstream deployment. We present the first systematic comparison of four channel adaptation methods (Conv1d projection, spherical spline interpolation (SSI), source-space decomposition, and Riemannian re-centering) across five pretrained EEG foundation models (5M--157M parameters), five downstream tasks, and two training regimes with 10--15 random seeds each. We find that rigid-montage models (BENDR, Neuro-GPT) require external adaptation, while flexible models (EEGPT, CBraMod) match or exceed it natively when fine-tuned but benefit from external methods under frozen-encoder deployment. A probe-SFT asymmetry exists: external adaptation can cause severe negative transfer during fine-tuning of flexible models. The optimal method is architecture-dependent (Conv1d for BENDR, SSI/Riemannian for Neuro-GPT, source-space decomposition for depression detection), and 5M-parameter CBraMod outperforms models up to 31×\times larger on 4/5 datasets, consistent with independent findings that compact EEG-specific architectures can match larger models.
Kuntal Kokate, Bruno Aristimunha, Dung Truong +1
Electroencephalography Foundation ModelsParameter-Efficient AdaptationWireless Foundation ModelsElectrochemical ModelsFrozen EncoderChannel State Information
AskPDF