cs.LGOct 7, 2026

A Proof-of-Concept Study of Weakly Supervised Labeling of Fine-Grained EEG Components for Artifact Attenuation

Authors: Lu Wang-Nöth, Hai Huang, Philipp Heiler, Shuqiong Wu, Liyun Zhang, Helmut Mayer

Organizations: Institute for Applied Computer Science, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Munich, Germany · brainboost GmbH, Munich, Germany · Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Osaka, Japan · Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is highly susceptible to electromyographic (EMG) artifacts, whose temporal heterogeneity and spatial-spectral overlap with neural activity can leave mixed sources after blind source separation. Existing artifact-removal methods are further limited by scarce reliable component-level ground truth: expert annotations are costly and subjective, while no established method provides realistic simulation-based ground truth for EMG contamination in multichannel scalp EEG. To address these limitations, we propose a framework combining a frequency-aware high-dimensional representation with Multi-Instance Learning. The representation unfolds separated components into frequency-resolved intra-components, creating a space in which mixed neural and muscular activity becomes more separable, while the weakly supervised learning formulation enables artifact-likelihood scores for individual intra-components to be learned from epoch-level labels without finer-grained ground truth. The resulting intra-component classifier supports fine-grained EMG artifact detection and score-guided attenuation. Experiments on held-out subjects show that the framework learns informative intra-component scores and reduces artifact-related spectral deviations most clearly for jaw tension, with moderate effects for raising eyebrows and limited effects for frowning.

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