Cross-Subject EEG Decoding

EEG: Electroencephalography

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Overview

Cross-subject EEG decoding asks whether models trained on some people can recognize brain states in new people, a key challenge for brain-computer interfaces and clinical tools. Approaches include domain adaptation and alignment, Riemannian covariance methods, contrastive and self-supervised representation learning, and EEG foundation models; some use limited target-subject calibration, while others aim for zero-shot transfer. Studies commonly use leave-one-subject-out tests on motor imagery, emotion, and clinical EEG, but results vary by task and population. A central tension is balancing shared patterns with individual differences while ensuring gains are not caused by leakage or subject-identity shortcuts.

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78 papers14 papers in the last four weeks, up 17% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Apr 17, 2026

PA-TCNet: Pathology-Aware Temporal Calibration with Physiology-Guided Target Refinement for Cross-Subject Motor Imagery EEG Decoding in Stroke Patients

Stroke patient cross-subject electroencephalography (EEG) decoding of motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) is essential for motor rehabilitation, yet lesion-related abnormal temporal dynamics and pronounced inter-patient heterogeneity often undermine generalization. Existing adaptation methods are easily misled by pathological slow-wave activity and unstable target-domain pseudo-labels. To address this challenge, we propose PA-TCNet, a pathology-aware temporal calibration framework with physiology-guided target refinement for stroke motor imagery decoding. PA-TCNet integrates two coordinated components. The Pathology-aware Rhythmic State Mamba (PRSM) module decomposes EEG spatiotemporal features into slowly varying rhythmic context and fast transient perturbations, injecting the fused pathological context into selective state propagation to more effectively capture abnormal temporal dynamics. The Physiology-Guided Target Calibration (PGTC) module constructs source-domain sensorimotor region-of-interest templates, imposing physiological consistency constraints and dynamically refining target-domain pseudo-labels, thereby improving adaptation reliability. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on two independent stroke EEG datasets, XW-Stroke and 2019-Stroke, yielded mean accuracies of 66.56% and 72.75%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. These results indicate that jointly modeling pathological temporal dynamics and physiology-constrained pseudo-supervision can provide more robust cross-subject initialization for personalized post-stroke MI-BCI rehabilitation. The implemented code is available at https://github.com/wxk1224/PA-TCNet.

Xiangkai Wang, Yun Zhao, Dongyi He +5

School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing 401135, China; Chongqing Key Laboratory of Embodied Intelligence Perception and Autonomous Learning for Humanoid Robots; Key Laboratory of Advanced Equipment Intelligence of the Chongqing Education Commission, Chongqing 401135, China · School of Smart Health, Chongqing Polytechnic University of Electronic Technology, Chongqing 401131, China · Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong SAR, China +2

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingBrain-Computer InterfacesDomain AdaptationEEG DecodingState Space Models
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Mar 27, 2026

CA-TCN: A Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network for Direct Auditory Attention Decoding

A promising approach for steering auditory attention in complex listening environments relies on Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD), which aim to identify the attended speech stream in a multiple speaker scenario from neural recordings. Entrainment-based AAD approaches, typically assume access to clean speech sources and electroencephalography (EEG) signals to exploit low-frequency correlations between the neural response and the attended stimulus. In this study, we propose CA-TCN, a Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network that directly classifies the attended speaker. The proposed architecture integrates several best practices from convolutional neural networks in sequence processing tasks. Importantly, it explicitly aligns auditory stimuli and neural responses by employing separate causal and anticausal convolutions respectively, with distinct receptive fields operating in opposite temporal directions. Experimental results, obtained through comparisons with three baseline AAD models, demonstrated that CA-TCN consistently improved decoding accuracy across datasets and decision windows, with gains ranging from 0.5% to 3.2% for subject-independent models and from 0.8% to 2.9% for subject-specific models compared with the next best-performing model, AADNet. Moreover, these improvements were statistically significant in four of the six evaluated settings when comparing Minimum Expected Switch Duration distributions. Beyond accuracy, the model demonstrated spatial robustness across different conditions, as the EEG spatial filters exhibited stable patterns across datasets. Overall, this work introduces an accurate and unified AAD model that outperforms existing methods while considering practical benefits for online processing scenarios. These findings contribute to advancing the state of AAD and its applicability in real-world systems.

Iñigo García-Ugarte, Rubén Eguinoa, Ricardo San Martín +2

Department of Science, Universidad Pública de Navarra (UPNA), 31006 Pamplona, Spain · BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, 20009 San Sebastián, Spain · Department of Statistics, Computer Sciences and Mathematics, Universidad Pública de Navarra (UPNA), 31006 Pamplona, Spain +2

Neural DecodingTemporal Convolutional NetworksCross-Subject EEG Decoding
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Mar 22, 2026

CIPHER: Conformer-based Inference of Phonemes from High-density EEG

Decoding speech information from scalp EEG remains difficult due to low SNR and spatial blurring. We present CIPHER (Conformer-based Inference of Phonemes from High-density EEG Representations), a dual-pathway model using (i) ERP features and (ii) broadband DDA coefficients. On OpenNeuro ds006104 (24 participants, two studies with concurrent TMS), binary articulatory tasks reach near-ceiling performance but are highly confound-vulnerable (acoustic onset separability and TMS-target blocking). On the primary 11-class CVC phoneme task under full Study 2 LOSO (16 held-out subjects), performance is substantially lower (real-word WER: ERP 0.671 +/- 0.080, DDA 0.688 +/- 0.096, indicating limited fine-grained discriminability. We therefore position this work as a benchmark and feature-comparison study rather than an EEG-to-text system, and we constrain neural-representation claims to confound-controlled evidence.

Varshith Madishetty

EEG-to-Text DecodingConformerEEG DecodingCross-Subject EEG Decoding
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Mar 21, 2026

SATTC: Structure-Aware Label-Free Test-Time Calibration for Cross-Subject EEG-to-Image Retrieval

Cross-subject EEG-to-image retrieval for visual decoding is challenged by subject shift and hubness in the embedding space, which distort similarity geometry and destabilize top-k rankings, making small-k shortlists unreliable. We introduce SATTC (Structure-Aware Test-Time Calibration), a label-free calibration head that operates directly on the similarity matrix of frozen EEG and image encoders. SATTC combines a geometric expert, subject-adaptive whitening of EEG embeddings with an adaptive variant of Cross-domain Similarity Local Scaling (CSLS), and a structural expert built from mutual nearest neighbors, bidirectional top-k ranks, and class popularity, fused via a simple Product-of-Experts rule. On THINGS-EEG2 under a strict leave-one-subject-out protocol, standardized inference with cosine similarities, L2-normalized embeddings, and candidate whitening already yields a strong cross-subject baseline over the original ATM retrieval setup. Building on this baseline, SATTC further improves Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy, reduces hubness and per-class imbalance, and produces more reliable small-k shortlists. These gains transfer across multiple EEG encoders, supporting SATTC as an encoder-agnostic, label-free test-time calibration layer for cross-subject neural decoding.

Qunjie Huang, Weina Zhu

Yunnan University, China

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingEEG-Based Visual DecodingModel Calibration
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Mar 17, 2026

SpecMoE: Spectral Mixture-of-Experts Foundation Model for Cross-Species EEG Decoding

Decoding the orchestration of neural activity in electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a central challenge in bridging neuroscience with artificial intelligence. Foundation models have made strides in generalized EEG decoding, yet many existing frameworks primarily relying on separate temporal and spectral masking of raw signals during self-supervised pretraining. Such strategies often tend to bias learning toward high-frequency oscillations, as low-frequency rhythmic patterns can be easily inferred from the unmasked signal. We introduce a foundation model that utilizes a novel Gaussian-smoothed masking scheme applied to short-time Fourier transform (STFT) maps. By jointly applying time, frequency, and time-frequency Gaussian masks, we make the reconstruction task much more challenging, forcing the model to learn intricate neural patterns across both high- and low-frequency domains. To effectively recover signals under this aggressive masking strategy, we design SpecHi-Net, a U-shaped hierarchical architecture with multiple encoding and decoding stages. To accelerate large-scale pretraining, we partition the data into three subsets, each used to train an independent expert model. We then combine these models through SpecMoE, a mixture of experts framework guided by a learned spectral gating mechanism. SpecMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of EEG decoding tasks, including sleep staging, emotion recognition, motor imagery classification, abnormal signal detection, and drug effect prediction. Importantly, the model demonstrates strong cross-species and cross-subject generalization, maintaining high accuracy on both human and murine EEG datasets.

Davy Darankoum, Chloé Habermacher, Julien Volle +1

Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK 38000 Grenoble, France · SynapCell SAS, ZAC ISIPARC, 38330 Saint-Ismier, France

EEG DecodingEEG Foundation ModelsCross-Subject EEG DecodingFrequency-Domain Feature LearningMixture-of-Experts Models
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Mar 11, 2026

The Deep-Match Framework for Event-Related Potential Detection in EEG

Reliable detection of event-related potentials (ERPs) at the single-trial level remains a major challenge due to the low signal-to-noise ratio EEG recordings. In this work, we investigate whether incorporating prior knowledge about ERP templates into deep learning models can improve detection performance. We employ the Deep-Match framework for ERP detection using multi-channel EEG signals. The model is trained in two stages. First, an encoder-decoder architecture is trained to reconstruct input EEG signals, enabling the network to learn compact signal representations. In the second stage, the decoder is replaced with a detection module, and the network is fine-tuned for ERP identification. Two model variants are evaluated: a standard model with randomly initialized filters and a Deep-MF model in which input kernels are initialized using ERP templates. Model performance is assessed on a single-trial ERP detection task using leave-one-subject-out validation. The proposed Deep-MF model slightly outperforms the detector with standard kernel initialization for most held-out subjects. Despite substantial inter-subject variability, Deep-MF achieves a higher average F1-score (0.37) compared to the standard network (0.34), indicating improved robustness to cross-subject differences. The best performance obtained by Deep-MF reaches an F1-score of 0.71, exceeding the maximum score achieved by the standard model (0.59). These results demonstrate that ERP-informed kernel initialization can provide consistent improvements in subject-independent single-trial ERP detection. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of integrating domain knowledge with deep learning architectures for EEG analysis. The proposed approach represents a step toward practical wearable EEG and passive brain-computer interface systems capable of real-time monitoring of cognitive processes.

Marek Zylinski, Bartosz Tomasz Smigielski, Gerard Cybulski

Institute of Metrology and Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Mechatronics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

ElectroencephalographyEEG DecodingCross-Subject EEG DecodingNeural Network Initialization
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Mar 11, 2026

LAtte: Hyperbolic Lorentz Attention for Cross-Subject EEG Classification

Electroencephalogram (EEG) classification plays a key role in medical diagnosis and brain-computer interfaces, but remains challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios and high inter-subject variability. As a result, many existing approaches rely on subject-specific models, which fail to exploit shared structure in neural signals and do not generalize to unseen subjects. To address these limitations, we propose LAtte, a framework that combines Lorentz attention with a hyperbolic InceptionTime-based encoder to improve cross-subject generalization in EEG classification. The model explicitly decomposes EEG signals into a learned baseline component and task-relevant deviations, enabling more structured representation learning. To further improve robustness and adaptability, we incorporate subject-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules at both encoder and decoder levels, augmented with a Lorentz boost-based LoRA mechanism and hyperbolic projection layers to reduce overfitting in geometric representations. We evaluate LAtte with and without finetuning in three settings: subject-specific, subject-conditional, and leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) on five established EEG datasets, achieving a consistent improvement in performance over current state-of-the-art methods for smaller datasets and maintaining performance for larger datasets.

Ahmad Bdeir, Johannes Burchert, Tom Hanika +2

Data Science Group, Universität Hildesheim · ISMLL, Universität Hildesheim

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingElectroencephalographyEEG DecodingAttention Mechanisms
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Mar 11, 2026

Group Resonance Network: Learnable Prototypes and Multi-Subject Resonance for EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition remains challenging in cross-subject settings due to severe inter-subject variability. Existing methods mainly learn subject-invariant features, but often under-exploit stimulus-locked group regularities shared across subjects. To address this issue, we propose the Group Resonance Network (GRN), which integrates individual EEG dynamics with offline group resonance modeling. GRN contains three components: an individual encoder for band-wise EEG features, a set of learnable group prototypes for prototype-induced resonance, and a multi-subject resonance branch that encodes PLV/coherence-based synchrony with a small reference set. A resonance-aware fusion module combines individual and group-level representations for final classification. Experiments on SEED and DEAP under both subject-dependent and leave-one-subject-out protocols show that GRN consistently outperforms competitive baselines, while additional analyses confirm the effects of prototype learning, PLV/coherence resonance, and leakage-safe reference construction.

Renwei Meng

Anhui University, Hefei, China

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingElectroencephalographyPrototype LearningEEG Emotion Recognition
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Feb 26, 2026

Scattering Transform for Auditory Attention Decoding

The use of hearing aids will increase in the coming years due to demographic change. One open problem that remains to be solved by a new generation of hearing aids is the cocktail party problem. A possible solution is electroencephalography-based auditory attention decoding. This has been the subject of several studies in recent years, which have in common that they use the same preprocessing methods in most cases. In this work, in order to achieve an advantage, the use of a scattering transform is proposed as an alternative to these preprocessing methods. The two-layer scattering transform is compared with a regular filterbank, the synchrosqueezing short-time Fourier transform and the common preprocessing. To demonstrate the performance, the known and the proposed preprocessing methods are compared for different classification tasks on two widely used datasets, provided by the KU Leuven (KUL) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Both established and new neural-network-based models, CNNs, LSTMs, and recent Transformer/graph-based models are used for classification. Various evaluation strategies were compared, with a focus on the task of classifying speakers who are unknown from the training. We show that the two-layer scattering transform can significantly improve the performance for subject-related conditions, especially on the KUL dataset. However, on the DTU dataset, this only applies to some of the models, or when larger amounts of training data are provided, as in 10-fold cross-validation. This suggests that the scattering transform is capable of extracting additional relevant information.

René Pallenberg, Fabrice Katzberg, Alfred Mertins +1

Institute for Signal Processing, University of Luebeck, 23562 Luebeck, Germany · Department for Vision and Machine Learning, FPI Food Processing Innovation GmbH & Co. KG, 23556 Luebeck, Germany · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), AI for Assistive Health Technologies, 23562 Luebeck, Germany

Wavelet Scattering TransformsEEG DecodingNeural DecodingCross-Subject EEG Decoding
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Feb 22, 2026

CRCC: Contrast-Based Robust Cross-Subject and Cross-Site Representation Learning for EEG

EEG-based neural decoding models often fail to generalize across acquisition sites due to structured, site-dependent biases implicitly exploited during training. We reformulate cross-site clinical EEG learning as a bias-factorized generalization problem, in which domain shifts arise from multiple interacting sources. We identify three fundamental bias factors and propose a general training framework that mitigates their influence through data standardization and representation-level constraints. We construct a standardized multi-site EEG benchmark for Major Depressive Disorder and introduce CRCC, a two-stage training paradigm combining encoder-decoder pretraining with joint fine-tuning via cross-subject/site contrastive learning and site-adversarial optimization. CRCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and achieves a 10.7 percentage-point improvement in balanced accuracy under strict zero-shot site transfer, demonstrating robust generalization to unseen environments.

Xiaobin Wong, Zhonghua Zhao, Haoran Guo +5

Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +6

Cross-Dataset GeneralizationCross-Domain GeneralizationCross-Subject EEG DecodingDepression DetectionContrastive Learning
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Feb 18, 2026

ASPEN: Spectral-Temporal Fusion for Cross-Subject Brain Decoding

Cross-subject generalization in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) remains challenging due to individual variability in neural signals. We investigate whether spectral representations offer more stable features for cross-subject transfer than temporal waveforms. Through correlation analyses across three EEG paradigms (SSVEP, P300, and Motor Imagery), we find that spectral features exhibit consistently higher cross-subject similarity than temporal signals. Motivated by this observation, we introduce ASPEN, a hybrid architecture that combines spectral and temporal feature streams via multiplicative fusion, requiring cross-modal agreement for features to propagate. Experiments across six benchmark datasets reveal that ASPEN is able to dynamically achieve the optimal spectral-temporal balance depending on the paradigm. ASPEN achieves the best unseen-subject accuracy on three of six datasets and competitive performance on others, demonstrating that multiplicative multimodal fusion enables effective cross-subject generalization.

Megan Lee, Seung Ha Hwang, Inhyeok Choi +3

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Kyung Hee University, Yongin, South Korea · Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Deajeon, South Korea +1

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingBrain-Computer InterfacesFeature FusionMultimodal FusionFrequency-Domain Feature Learning
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Nov 24, 2025

Geometry-Aware Deep Congruence Networks for Manifold Learning in Cross-Subject Motor Imagery

Cross-subject motor imagery decoding remains a fundamental challenge in EEG-based brain-computer interfaces due to substantial inter-subject variability. Recent approaches have leveraged Riemannian geometry by representing EEG signals as covariance matrices on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. However, existing methods primarily focus on manifold-based representations while largely overlooking subject-specific variations in covariance dispersion and orientation. In this work, we address these challenges through geometry-aware congruence transformations and propose three complementary models: (i) Discriminative Congruence Transform (DCT), (ii) Deep Linear DCT (DLDCT), and (iii) Deep DCT-UNet (DDCT-UNet). The proposed models are evaluated both as manifold alignment modules for downstream classifiers and as end-to-end discriminative architectures optimized via cross-entropy with a custom logistic regression head. Experiments on challenging cross-subject motor imagery benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in transductive decoding performance, achieving 2-3% higher accuracy than strong baselines. These results highlight the effectiveness of geometry-aware congruence learning for mitigating inter-subject variability in EEG decoding.

Sanjeev Manivannan, Chandra Shekar Lakshminarayan

Department of Biotechnology · Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingMI ClassificationBrain-Computer InterfacesNeural DecodingEEG DecodingGeometric Representation Learning+1
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Nov 18, 2025

Interpretable Multimodal EEG-ECG Framework for Neonatal Seizure Prediction and Patient-Adaptive Transfer Learning

Neonatal seizures carry substantial risks of acute brain injury and long-term neurodevelopmental impairment, motivating the need for timely identification of impending seizure activity. While continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring remains the clinical gold standard, reliable patient-independent seizure prediction in neonates remains largely under-explored. We propose an interpretable multimodal framework that combines EEG and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals for neonatal seizure prediction. Our method uses mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) representations processed by a lightweight (approx. 70k-parameter) convolutional neural network with squeeze-and-excitation attention. The framework was evaluated on the Helsinki neonatal EEG-ECG dataset and the Siena scalp EEG-ECG dataset. Under strict leave-one-patient-out (LOPO) evaluation, patient-independent prediction proved challenging (mean accuracy 58.5%, F1-score 60.3%), highlighting substantial inter-subject variability in neonatal EEG. However, fine-tuning the pretrained model with only five minutes of patient-specific data per class improved performance to 95.87% accuracy and 95.85% F1-score, demonstrating the feasibility of rapid patient-adaptive transfer learning. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) identified informative EEG channels that showed partial spatial agreement with clinically reported seizure origins. These findings suggest that fully patient-independent neonatal seizure prediction remains challenging, but that patient-adaptive fine-tuning with a small amount of data may provide a practical pathway toward personalized neonatal seizure prediction systems.

Sithmini Ranasingha, Agasthi Haputhanthri, Hansa Marasinghe +5

Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Canada · Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia +1

EEG Seizure DetectionCross-Subject EEG DecodingTransfer Learning
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Nov 10, 2025

NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment

Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

Wenjiang Zhang, Sifeng Wang, Yuwei Su +3

School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · Queen Mary School Hainan, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Hainan 570100, China

EEG-Based Visual DecodingCross-Subject EEG DecodingCross-Modal AlignmentMultimodal SSL
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Sep 1, 2025

Learning Domain- and Class-Disentangled Prototypes for Domain-Generalized EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition plays a critical role in affective Brain-Computer Interfaces (aBCIs), yet its practical deployment remains limited by inter-subject variability, reliance on target-domain data, and unavoidable label noise. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-domain Aggregation Transfer learning framework with domain-class prototypes (MAT) for emotion recognition under completely unseen target domains. MAT introduces a feature decoupling module to disentangle class-invariant domain features from domain-invariant class features, enabling more robust and interpretable EEG representations. A Hierarchical-Domain Aggregation (HDA) mechanism based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) constructs superdomains to model shared distributional structures across subjects, while adaptive prototype updating refines domain and class prototypes to capture stable intrinsic representations. Moreover, a pairwise learning strategy reformulates classification as similarity estimation between sample pairs, effectively mitigating the effect of label noise. Extensive experiments on three public EEG emotion datasets (SEED, SEED-IV, and SEED-V) show that the accuracy of MAT is improved by 2.87%, 3.84%, and 2.05% compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model for unseen target domains. Our results provide a promising direction for emotion recognition under real-world unseen-subject scenarios.The source code is available at https://github.com/WuCB-BCI/MAT.

Guangli Li, Canbiao Wu, Zhehao Zhou +3

School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Hunan University of Technology, Zhuzhou 412008, China · School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China · Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, Shenzhen 518060, China +1

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingPrototype-Based ClassificationDomain GeneralizationRepresentation DisentanglementEEG Emotion Recognition
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Aug 11, 2025

Cross-Subject and Cross-Montage EEG Transfer Learning via Individual Tangent Space Alignment and Spatial-Riemannian Feature Fusion

Personalised music-based interventions offer a powerful means of supporting motor rehabilitation by dynamically tailoring auditory stimuli to provide external timekeeping cues, modulate affective states, and stabilise gait patterns. Generalisable Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) thus hold promise for adapting these interventions across individuals. However, inter-subject variability in EEG signals, further compounded by movement-induced artefacts and motor planning differences, hinders the generalisability of BCIs and results in lengthy calibration processes. We propose Individual Tangent Space Alignment (ITSA), a novel pre-alignment strategy incorporating subject-specific recentering, distribution matching, and supervised rotational alignment to enhance cross-subject generalisation. Our hybrid architecture fuses Regularised Common Spatial Patterns (RCSP) with Riemannian geometry in parallel and sequential configurations, improving class separability while maintaining the geometric structure of covariance matrices for robust statistical computation. Using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation, `ITSA' demonstrates significant performance improvements across subjects and conditions. The parallel fusion approach shows the greatest enhancement over its sequential counterpart, with robust performance maintained across varying data conditions and electrode configurations. The code will be made publicly available at the time of publication.

Nicole Lai-Tan, Xiao Gu, Marios G. Philiastides +1

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingBrain-Computer InterfacesEEG Decoding
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Jul 28, 2025

Brain foundation model-guided source-selective domain adaptation for cross-subject EEG decoding

Cross-subject motor-imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) decoding remains challenging because substantial inter-subject variability can cause both negative transfer from poorly matched source subjects and persistent distribution discrepancies between source and target domains. Existing multi-source domain adaptation methods often incorporate all available source domains or estimate source relevance using signal-level or task-specific representations, while distribution alignment is frequently performed only at the feature level. These limitations may introduce irrelevant source knowledge and fail to preserve class-discriminative structures across subjects. In this study, we propose a brain foundation model-guided multi-source domain adaptation framework (BFM-MSDA) for cross-subject MI-EEG decoding. The method first utilizes representations learned by a pretrained brain foundation model to estimate source--target compatibility and retrieve target-relevant sources. Subsequently, a relevance-weighted dual alignment strategy is applied to the selected sources and the unlabeled target domain. Specifically, Cauchy--Schwarz (CS) divergence is used to reduce discrepancies in marginal feature distributions, while conditional Cauchy--Schwarz (CCS) divergence further aligns class-dependent decision distributions. Source relevance is incorporated into both alignment terms so that more transferable source subjects contribute more strongly to adaptation. Experiments on two public MI-EEG benchmarks achieve average accuracies of 86.16% and 78.41%, outperforming representative cross-subject decoding and domain adaptation methods. Additional experiments with a large source pool further demonstrate that target-aware source retrieval improves scalability while mitigating negative transfer. These results highlight the importance of informed source selection under cross-subject distribution shift.

Jinzhou Wu, Baoping Tang, Qikang Li +3

State Key Laboratory of Mechanical Transmission, College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China · Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Machine Learning Group, UiT–The Arctic University of Norway, 9019 Tromsø, Norway

Cross-Subject EEG DecodingMulti-Source Domain AdaptationMI Classification
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Apr 10, 2024

Are EEG Sequences Time Series? EEG Classification with Time Series Models and Joint Subject Training

As with most other data domains, EEG data analysis relies on rich domain-specific preprocessing. Beyond such preprocessing, machine learners would hope to deal with such data as with any other time series data. For EEG classification many models have been developed with layer types and architectures we typically do not see in time series classification. Furthermore, typically separate models for each individual subject are learned, not one model for all of them. In this paper, we systematically study the differences between EEG classification models and generic time series classification models. We describe three different model setups to deal with EEG data from different subjects, subject-specific models (most EEG literature), subject-agnostic models and subject-conditional models. In experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that off-the-shelf time series classification models trained per subject perform close to EEG classification models, but that do not quite reach the performance of domain-specific modeling. Additionally, we combine time-series models with subject embeddings to train one joint subject-conditional classifier on all subjects. The resulting models are competitive with dedicated EEG models in 2 out of 3 datasets, even outperforming all EEG methods on one of them.

Johannes Burchert, Thorben Werner, Vijaya Krishna Yalavarthi +3

Institute for Computer Science, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, German

Time Series ClassificationCross-Subject EEG DecodingEEG Decoding
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