EEG Emotion Recognition

EEG: Electroencephalography

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2 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 23

Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

T-SNN: Temporal Simplicial Neural Network for EEG Decoding

Decoding brain states requires models that capture both the evolution of neural activity and interactions among groups of brain regions. Existing EEG methods often treat recordings as multivariate time series or represent functional connectivity with pairwise graphs, leaving dynamic higher-order interactions largely unmodeled. We introduce the Temporal Simplicial Neural Network (T-SNN), which represents EEG recordings as sequences of evolving simplicial complexes. By combining simplicial convolutions with recurrent updates, T-SNN jointly learns higher-order interactions and their temporal evolution. On the seven-class SEED-VII emotion recognition task, T-SNN outperforms convolutional, recurrent, graph-based, and Transformer methods in both trial-wise and cross-subject evaluations. Incorporating eye-movement features further improves performance, demonstrating the framework's potential for multimodal brain-state decoding.

Nikita Malik, Shubhajit Roy, Mohit Kataria +4

Bharti School of Telecommunication Technology and Management Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi · Department of Computer Science & Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar · Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi +4

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding EEG Decoding Multimodal Emotion Recognition EEG Emotion Recognition

Sep 14, 2026cs.HC

BRIDGE-EEG: Bridging Self-Supervised Pretraining and Efficient Deployment for Cross-Dataset EEG Classification

The growing use of electroencephalography (EEG) motivates automated analysis that is accurate, transferable, and deployable on constrained hardware. Recent EEG foundation models learn general representations from large-scale pretraining, but their size and computational cost limit edge and wearable deployment. We introduce BRIDGE-EEG, an efficient multi-task EEG classification pipeline that preserves the benefits of pretraining while reducing model size. A unified preprocessing scheme maps heterogeneous recordings with different channel counts, montages, and sampling rates to a device-agnostic 62-channel time--frequency representation. We pretrain an SE-ResNet18 teacher (11.84 M parameters) with SimCLR on unlabeled EEG from five heterogeneous datasets, then compress it into SE-ResNet8 (1.56 M) and SE-ResNet4 (0.48 M) students using task-agnostic and task-specific distillation. We evaluate six benchmarks spanning abnormality detection, motor imagery, and emotion recognition. For abnormality detection and emotion recognition, the students achieve accuracy comparable to or better than several recent EEG foundation models with 10--1,000

\times

more parameters. Motor imagery shows a remaining representation gap, highlighting the importance of pretraining diversity. Inference profiling on a server GPU, desktop CPU, and NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano shows up to 3.0

\times

lower edge energy per inference (15.64 mJ vs. 46.67 mJ). The compact models further support future deployment on MCU-class wearables.

Meghna Roy Chowdhury, Chengwei Zhou, Haotian Yu +2

Purdue University, Indiana, USA · Case Western University, Ohio, USA

Self-Supervised Pre-Training Edge Inference EEG Emotion Recognition Cross-Dataset Generalization

Aug 13, 2026eess.SP

Graph Learning for Cross-Subject, Cross-Population EEG Emotion Decoding and Model-Derived Spatial-Spectral Neural Signatures

Cross subject emotion decoding from electroencephalography EEG requires representations that accommodate individual variability while preserving spatial spectral structure for interpretation. This study introduces EmoDiPyraTrans, a differential graph Transformer that integrates adaptive graph recurrence, differential attention, pyramid fusion and distribution regularization over sequential relative power spectral density graphs. Across SEED, FACED, MAHNOB HCI, DEAP and DREAMER, the model achieved the highest participant mean accuracy and positive class F1 among the evaluated methods, with accuracy and F1 both reaching 0.928 on SEED. On DEP EEG, positive versus neutral accuracy reached 0.802 within healthy controls and 0.704 within participants with depression, compared with 0.591 under healthy to depression transfer and 0.581 with mixed population development. Complementary SEED analyses identified distributed spatial weighting and an alpha centred spectral preference, while configurations averaging six channels retained near full performance. These findings link generalization assessment with model derived candidate signatures to support interpretable EEG emotion decoding, with code available at https://github.com/hdy6438/EmoDiPyraTrans.

Dongyi He, Bin Jiang, Xiangkai Wang +4

School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing, 400054, China · School of Smart Health, Chongqing Polytechnic University of Electronic Technology, Chongqing, 401331, China · Affiliated Lianyungang Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Lianyungang, 222002, China +1

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding EEG Decoding EEG Emotion Recognition Graph Transformer

Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

A Multi-Scale Temporal Framework with Dynamic Fusion for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

Mixed emotions represent a clinically relevant but still underexplored target for automatic emotion recognition. EEG provides millisecond-level access to neural activity, yet most EEG pipelines analyze the signal through a single temporal window, thereby fixing the temporal structure available to the model. This study introduces a multi-scale temporal framework for EEG-based emotion recognition. The EEG waveform is decomposed into windows of one or several durations, processed by a shared attention-based encoder, and integrated through a dynamic fusion module that assigns sample-specific weights across temporal scales. The framework is evaluated under a subject-independent protocol in binary and three-class settings, with the three-class task including the mixed affective category. The best results are 65.22% for the two-class task and 45.43% for the three-class task. Both are obtained with three-scale dynamic-fusion configurations and remain substantially above the full-signal baseline. The best-performing temporal scales differ between the two tasks. Dynamic fusion outperforms concatenation in the highest-scoring two-class configuration and slightly exceeds it in the highest-scoring three-class configuration, although these multi-scale settings require substantially more computation than the full-signal baseline.

Stefanos Gkikas, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li +3

Honda Research Institute Japan Wako City, Japan · Faculty of Information Science and Engineering Ocean University of China Qingdao, China · BioSIS (Biosensing & Intelligent Systems) Lab Centre for Intelligent Computing and Systems University of Canberra Canberra, Australia +1

Multi-Scale Feature Fusion EEG Emotion Recognition Emotion Recognition

Aug 9, 2026cs.LG

MGMCL: Multi-Granularity Manifold Contrastive Learning With Neural ODEs for Cross-Subject EEG Emotion Recognition

Cross-subject electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition remains challenging due to substantial inter-individual variability and discrete formulation that overlooks affective continuity. Existing methods operate in Euclidean space and focus on marginal distribution alignment, failing to preserve the semantic structure of emotions across subjects. This article proposes MGMCL, reconceptualizing emotion recognition as learning continuous representations on symmetric positive definite (SPD) Riemannian manifolds. The frame?work introduces multi-granularity manifold contrastive learning at instance, emotion, and trajectory levels while preserving semantic ordering. Neural ordinary differential equations on manifolds model continuous emotion dynamics. Cross-subject generalization employs Gromov-Wasserstein manifold alignment. Weakly-supervised learning enables continuous valence-arousal-dominance prediction from discrete labels. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 91.23% accuracy on SEED, 73.82% on SEED-IV, and 76.38% on DEAP, achieving consistent improvements of 1.89%, 1.66%, and 1.28% over previous best methods, respectively.

Xiang Xie

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding Contrastive Learning EEG Emotion Recognition Emotion Recognition

Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

Checkpoint Selection and Evaluation in EEG Emotion Recognition

Checkpoint selection can improve an electroencephalography (EEG) emotion-recognition score without improving performance on other trials. We compared selection and scoring on disjoint trial pools along fixed training trajectories. A same-session SEED study comprised 300 trajectories from 15 participants, two models and five trial-role rotations. Another 276 trajectories extended the comparison to separate training, validation and target sessions in SEED, SEED-IV and SEED-V, with 15, 15 and 16 participants, respectively. Increasing the candidate set from five to 80 checkpoints raised the same-session dynamical graph convolutional neural network (DGCNN) selection-pool score by 6.24 percentage points, while the other-pool change was -1.24 (descriptive 95% participant-bootstrap interval -2.67 to 0.26). Under the cross-session design, DGCNN retained gains of 4.47 [1.79, 7.25], 4.27 [2.00, 6.53] and 2.75 [0.79, 4.78] points across the three datasets. Multilayer perceptron results varied across datasets. Common-time-range analysis and trial-level scoring supported the respective patterns. Both target pools supplied labels for symmetric checkpoint selection; these results concern retention across trials, not evaluation without target labels. Complete policy curves and executable reconstruction support reporting selected-score improvements alongside performance on other trials, rather than assuming a universal penalty for checkpoint search.

Hanting Suo, Hongxun Wang, Yuwen Li

School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China. · The State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.

EEG Decoding EEG Emotion Recognition

Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Differentiable Logic Gate Networks for Low-Latency EEG Classification on Edge Devices

Real-time EEG classification on edge devices is bottlenecked by the floating-point arithmetic of conventional neural networks. We investigated Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (Diff-Logic) as a hardware-native alternative that compiles models into pure Boolean circuits executable via bitwise CPU operations. Through rigorous iso-parameter experiments across four EEG datasets spanning two classification tasks, binary dementia detection and 3-class emotion recognition, we compared Diff-Logic against matched-capacity Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Binarized Neural Network (BNN) baselines at four complexity tiers (50k-500k parameters). On dementia screening, Diff-Logic achieved 80.2% Macro F1, outperforming the MLP baseline by 6.8%. On emotion recognition, the MLP retained a moderate performance advantage but incurred a 2.3

\times

higher latency and 14

\times

larger model size when deployed on a power-constrained (7W) Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano CPU (Single-core). Critically, Diff-Logic inference time remained nearly constant across a 10

\times

increase in model scale, achieving a peak speedup of 2.9

\times

over MLPs at the largest complexity tier. Our results establish logic-based neural architectures as a practical paradigm for resource-constrained brain-computer interfaces, achieving competitive or superior performance while natively satisfying the latency and memory constraints of portable edge deployment. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Shyamal-Dharia/eeg-difflogic

Shyamal Y. Dharia, Stephen D. Smith, Camilo E. Valderrama

† The University of Winnipeg, Department of Applied Computer Science · ‡ The University of Winnipeg, Department of Psychology · ⋄University of Manitoba, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering +1

Electroencephalography Brain-Computer Interfaces Edge Inference EEG Emotion Recognition

Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Graph-Regularized Deep Learning for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition with Psychologically-Grounded Label Structure

EEG-based emotion recognition is critical for mental health monitoring and affective brain-computer interfaces, yet existing deep learning approaches often treat emotion classes as isolated labels, ignoring their psychological interdependencies. We propose a graph-regularized learning framework that conceptualizes emotions as nodes in a graph where edges encode proximity based on dimensional emotion theories. We adapt three complementary regularization strategies--Graph Label Smoothing (intuitive soft labeling), Commuting distance on graph via Graph Laplacian (spectral graph theory), and Sliced Wasserstein Distance (optimal transport on graph)--ordered by increasing computational complexity. These strategies penalize model predictions that deviate from the established emotion topology. Our framework is evaluated across three representative backbone architectures: AudioTransformer (pure transformer), Conformer (CNN-transformer hybrid), and DCGNN (causal graph neural network), demonstrating architecture-agnostic benefits. Experiments on SEED-IV (4 classes) and SEED-V (5 classes) datasets show consistent improvements: best case up to +5.42% accuracy and 39% reduction in psychologically implausible misclassifications. Ultimately, our framework help raise the upper bound of performance achievable with standard approaches. Code will be released.

Dongyang Kuang, Zizheng Ma, Yushan Zhang +1

School of Mathematics (Zhuhai), Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

EEG Emotion Recognition

Jul 5, 2026cs.LG

Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization. However, its application to EEG-based emotion recognition remains largely unexplored. Existing SSL methods struggle to capture the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies of EEG signals under varying channel configurations, extract fine-grained representations resilient to noise, and derive global features that generalize well across subjects. To address these challenges, we propose Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning (MGCRL), a novel SSL framework specifically designed for EEG-based emotion recognition. Built upon a region-aware spatiotemporal encoder, MGCRL integrates generative and contrastive learning to achieve both fine-grained and global discriminative representations for cross-dataset generalization. MGCRL introduces three key designs: 1) a spatiotemporal encoder that incorporates region-based graph convolution to capture localized spatial and functional relationships, enhancing region-specific feature learning and mitigating the impact of varying EEG channel configurations across datasets; 2) a generative learning mechanism based on the joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that utilizes masked features to capture noise robustness fine-grained representations, improving the model's capability to characterize subtle emotional states; and 3) a contrastive learning strategy that leverages masked and original features to learn temporally stable and cross-subject-invariant representations across the same stimuli, boosting emotion discrimination and cross-subject generalization. Under these designs, MGCRL exhibits remarkable ability to learn universal representation. Extensive experiments involving pretraining on the large FACED dataset and fine-tuning on multiple SEED-series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MGCRL.

Huqin Weng, Jiayang Huang, Yimin Wen +3

Contrastive Learning Self-Supervised Learning Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning EEG Emotion Recognition Cross-Dataset Generalization

Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

See the Emotion: A Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling for EEG Emotion Recognition

Despite the high accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition, existing models remain opaque "black boxes", lacking semantic grounding between abstract neural features and human-interpretable states. In this paper, we reframe EEG explainability as a cross-modal generation task, shifting the paradigm from feature attribution to behavioral visualization. We introduce Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling, a novel framework that translates high-dimensional EEG signals into identity-anonymized facial emojis. Guided by the neuroscientific inspiration of neural-facial association, this approach grounds neural representations in the manifold of observable facial dynamics. Technically, our framework integrates FMENet, a specialized backbone modeling expression-relevant spatial synergies, and the Facial Emoji Learning Branch (FELB), which treats emoji reconstruction as a structured semantic regularizer. Extensive experiments on EAV and MMER benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among EEG-only models. Crucially, it generates semantically faithful facial animations that provide a transparent, privacy-preserving window into the brain's emotional evolution, effectively allowing users to "see the emotion" directly from neural signals. Code is available at https://github.com/xian-sh/SeeEmotion

Jingjing Hu, Guo Dan, Haofan Cheng +4

Hefei University of Technology · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center · The Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering with Big Data, Hefei University of Technology +3

Multimodal Model Interpretability EEG Emotion Recognition

Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

PRISM: Prioritized Channel Importance with Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-Subject EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalogram (EEG) captures endogenous brain activity with high temporal fidelity and holds substantial promise for precise emotion decoding. However, channel redundancy and pronounced inter-subject variability remain key obstacles to scalable generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework termed PRioritized channel Importance with Semi-supervised doMain adaptation (PRISM), enabling label-efficient cross-subject emotion decoding. On the channel side, PRISM assigns differentiable, data-dependent channel weights via a lightweight expert ensemble, amplifying reliable electrodes while suppressing distractors. On the domain side, PRISM leverages unlabeled data through confidence-filtered pseudo-labels to drive consistency regularization and domain alignment, mitigating subject-specific heterogeneity. Extensive experiments show that PRISM surpasses state-of-the-art methods on DEAP, DREAMER, and SEED datasets, achieving robust cross-subject generalization given limited annotations.

Xin Zhou, Xiang Zhang, Hao Deng +1

School of Computing, T. J Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University - State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902 USA · Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02114 USA

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Cross-Domain Generalization Feature Selection EEG Emotion Recognition

Jun 13, 2026cs.LG

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

Jinhan Liu, Mahsa Shoaran

Institutes of Electrical and Micro Engineering and Neuro-X, EPFL, Geneva, Switzerland.

Representation Learning Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning EEG Emotion Recognition

Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Transformer Based Model for Spatiotemporal Feature Learning in EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely adopted technique for monitoring brain activity, offering valuable insights into neurological states due to its high temporal resolution and cost-effectiveness. To enhance the analysis of complex EEG data, we propose EEG-TransNet, an architecture designed to capture temporal, regional, and synchronous features of EEG signals. EEG-TransNet introduces three key modules: 1) a preprocessing and feature extraction module leveraging ResNet and wavelet-based denoising, 2) a Local Self-Attention Block for regional feature learning, and 3) a Fuzzy-Attention Synchronous Transformer (FAST) to model spatiotemporal dependencies. Through extensive experiments on three EEG datasets (BETA, SEED, and DepEEG), the proposed model consistently outperforms other methods in terms of classification accuracy and robustness across varying signal lengths. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of the Local Self-Attention Block in improving performance, and the inclusion of depthwise separable convolutions in the decoder reduces computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. EEG-TransNet's ability to generalize across subjects with minimal performance variation highlights its potential as a robust tool for EEG-based brain activity classification and emotion recognition tasks.

Xinglong Cui, Dian Gu

Beijing Neurodeep Technology Co., Ltd, Beijing, 100176, China · University of Pennsylvania, Seattle, 98121, USA

Electroencephalography Temporal Attention EEG Emotion Recognition Time Series Transformers

Jun 4, 2026cs.HC

EEGDancer: Dynamic Emotion Latent Space Masked Modeling with Reinforcement Learning for EEG Continuous Emotion Prediction

Continuous electroencephalography (EEG) emotion prediction aims to model the temporal evolution of human emotional states from EEG signals. Unlike conventional discrete emotion recognition, continuous prediction requires capturing long-range temporal dependencies and coherent emotional dynamics. However, existing methods mainly rely on point-wise regression and directly model noisy high-dimensional EEG features, limiting their ability to characterize continuous emotional evolution.To address these challenges, we propose EEGDancer, a dynamic emotional latent space learning framework for continuous EEG emotion prediction. The framework integrates vector-quantized representation learning, masked temporal modeling, and reinforcement learning-based trajectory optimization into a unified architecture.Specifically, a causal spatiotemporal Vector-Quantization Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) is designed to learn structured emotional prototypes and construct a discrete-continuous emotional latent space from EEG signals. Based on the learned latent representations, a Transformer-based masked dynamic modeling strategy captures long-range emotional dependencies and temporal evolution patterns. Furthermore, continuous emotion prediction is formulated as a sequential decision-making problem, and a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework is introduced to optimize emotional prediction trajectories at the sequence level instead of frame-wise local fitting.Extensive experiments on the SEED, SEED-IV, and Long-Term Naturalistic Emotion datasets demonstrate that EEGDancer consistently outperforms existing machine learning and deep learning methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed latent space and reinforcement learning-based trajectory optimization for modeling continuous EEG emotional dynamics.

Zhihao Zhou, Weishan Ye, Li Zhang +2

The School of Biomedical Engineering, Medical School, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · The Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound2026 Imaging, Shenzhen, China

Latent Dynamics Modeling EEG Emotion Recognition Sequence Modeling Emotion Recognition

May 31, 2026cs.AI

A Minimalist Brain-Computer Musical Interface for Real-Time Emotion-Driven Sonification: System Design and Preliminary Evaluation

This paper presents a minimalist brain-computer Musical Interface (BCMI) that functions as a real-time affective sonification system, translating prefrontal EEG activity into adaptive music. Emotional valence is estimated from frontal alpha asymmetry (AF7/AF8) and mapped to musical features such as mode, tempo, rhythmic density, and pitch register through a stochastic generative algorithm. The system integrates wireless EEG acquisition, real-time Python signal processing, and Ableton Live-based music generation synchronized via Lab Streaming Layer. An experiment with 22 participants investigated whether intentional emotional self-induction could modulate the BCMI neurofeedback signal. Linear mixed-effects analyses found no significant effects of target emotion or time, indicating that the frontal alpha asymmetry signal did not reliably distinguish instructed emotional states. Individual differences, including musical training and acting experience, explained more variance than the experimental manipulation, which accounted for only 0.40% of total signal variance. These findings highlight the challenges of using frontal alpha asymmetry as a voluntary control signal for closed-loop emotion regulation and suggest methodological directions for future BCMI research.

Pablo A. Monroy-D'Croz, Rafael Ramirez-Melendez, Julian Cespedes-Guevara

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain · Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia

Brain-Computer Interfaces Controllable Music Generation EEG Emotion Recognition

May 30, 2026cs.LG

Context-aware tokenization for Cross-subject Emotion Decoding from EEG

In cross-subject EEG emotion decoding, neighboring windows can inform the representation of a target window, but they contain both background variation and sustained task signals. This creates a challenge for contextual representation learning because subtracting shared activity can also remove useful information. We introduce the Morlet Spectral Transformer (MST), which conditions target-window tokens on a structured spectral summary before attention. MST averages the Morlet log-amplitude spectra of unlabeled same-trial neighbors and uses frequency-specific electrode projections to combine the target spectrum with its reference-relative residual. This retains access to absolute activity while incorporating context into a fixed attended target-token grid. Without external pretraining, MST achieves 66.5%, 40.7%, 36.1%, and 27.9% accuracy on SEED, SEED-IV, SEED-V, and SEED-VII under leave-one-subject-out evaluation, averaged over three random seeds, outperforming the evaluated pretrained and from-scratch baselines. On FACED, MST achieves 17.52% accuracy in nine-class cross-subject evaluation, exceeding the strongest evaluated baseline by 1.15 percentage points. We also performed the ablation studies across all 15 SEED subjects to evaluate the contribution of different components of MST.

Jiaxin Qing, Lexin Li

University of California, Berkeley

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding EEG Decoding Frequency-Domain Feature Learning EEG Emotion Recognition Time Series Transformers

May 29, 2026cs.HC

UF-AMA: A unified framework for cross-domain emotion recognition via adaptive multimodal alignment

In recent years, emotion recognition based on physiological signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG) has gained considerable attention, as internal physiological data offer greater objectivity and reliability compared to external behavioral data like facial expressions. However, due to distribution shifts caused by individual and contextual differences, along with variations in sample quality across modalities, constructing a cross-domain multimodal emotion recognition model with high generalization and robustness remains a key challenge. In this study, we propose a Unified Framework with Adaptive Multimodal Alignment (UF-AMA) to address cross-subject and cross-session emotion recognition using multimodal physiological signals. First, we construct a cross-modal feature fusion network comprising Transformer encoders and multi-head cross-attention modules, enabling the deep integration of EEG signals and eye-tracking data. Subsequently, we introduce a confidence-aware screening mechanism that dynamically assesses the predictive reliability of each modality branch on target domain samples, partitions samples into different quality subsets, and accordingly applies global consistency alignment and cross-modal distillation. Finally, we propose a multi-level domain adaptation framework that jointly optimizes the marginal and conditional distributions of both local modality-specific and global fusion features, thereby reducing cross-domain distribution shifts at multiple granularities. Extensive experiments on the SEED and SEED-IV datasets demonstrate that UF-AMA achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both cross-subject and cross-session tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/BetterCoderLab/UF-AMA.

Zheng Wang, Shuo Wang, Junhong Wang

Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China · Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, 230026, China

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Multimodal Emotion Recognition EEG Emotion Recognition Multimodal Fusion Emotion Recognition

May 28, 2026cs.LG

A Shared Valence Axis Across Modern LLMs and Human EEG: The Saturation Regularity

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful representation learners whose internal features increasingly align with human cognition. We study whether modern LLMs can serve as a lens for understanding neural representations in the human brain, focusing on emotional valence in EEG. We first build a one-dimensional valence direction, the V-axis, from modern LLMs using only nine emotion-evocative sentences. We validate it through zero-shot transfer to sentiment benchmarks and cross-model consistency across fourteen LLMs. We then show that this LLM-derived direction maps onto human neural activity. On a public EEG cohort of 123 subjects watching affective videos, a single linear projection on EEG features tracks the V-axis position of each stimulus. Moreover, 36 EEG emotion classifiers trained without exposure to the V-axis spontaneously rediscover the same direction in their internal representations, suggesting that the same valence structure emerges in both language models and human electrophysiology. Yet this convergence does not provide an effective training signal. We test twenty-five alignment strategies, including knowledge distillation, representational similarity, contrastive, and topographic losses; none improve decoding, and sixteen significantly reduce accuracy. We formalize this result as the saturation regularity: once task labels alone drive a brain-decoding network onto the target direction, additional supervision mainly distorts an already-saturated basin, while the load-bearing within-class residual receives little useful gradient. This regularity also indicates where improvement should come from: the residual subspace unreachable by supervision. Motivated by this insight, we ensemble across residual diversity rather than supervising the basin, improving balanced accuracy by 10.5% over the prior best on FACED, with the same effect replicated on SEED-V.

Yousef A. Radwan, Xuhui Liu, Kilichbek Haydarov +2

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Cross-Modal Representation Learning Neural Decoding EEG Emotion Recognition

May 26, 2026cs.CV

MSCGC-KAN: Multi-scale Causal Graph Convolution and Kolmogorov-Arnold Feature Mapping for EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition is an important affective computing task, and recent EEG foundation models provide useful generic representations for downstream adaptation. However, under the fine-tuning setting, three limitations remain prominent: insufficient modeling of multi-scale emotional dynamics, inadequate exploitation of inter-channel functional connectivity, and the limited expressive power of simple linear classification heads. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new EEG emotion recognition method, termed MSCGC-KAN, which introduces a structured task head composed of multi-scale causal graph convolution and Kolmogorov--Arnold feature mapping. Built on a pre-trained CBraMod backbone, MSCGC-KAN enhances downstream adaptation by jointly strengthening multi-scale temporal modeling, learnable inter-channel connectivity modeling, and nonlinear discriminative mapping within a compact task-specific head. This design preserves the representation advantage of the foundation model while making the classifier more sensitive to emotion-related spatiotemporal patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public FACED and SEED-VII datasets. The proposed method achieves a balanced accuracy of 60.66%, a Cohen's Kappa of 0.5525, and a weighted F1-score of 60.40% on FACED, and obtains 33.27%, 0.2223, and 33.64%, respectively, on SEED-VII. Compared with the CBraMod+Linear baseline, the balanced accuracy is improved by 5.91 and 2.03 percentage points on the two datasets, respectively. These results indicate that structured task-head design is an effective way to improve EEG emotion recognition when fine-tuning pre-trained EEG models.

Haoliang Gong, Qingshan She, Jiale Xu +2

School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China · Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Computer Collaborative Intelligence Technology and Applications

Convolutional Neural Networks EEG Emotion Recognition

May 24, 2026cs.LG

GL-LFGNN:A Global-Local Dual-branch Causal Graph Neural Network Based on Liang-Kleeman Information Flow for EEG Emotion Recognition

EEG-based emotion recognition holds significant promise for objective diagnosis of mood disorders. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the dominant paradigm for modeling inter-channel dependencies in EEG, yet existing approaches rely on symmetric adjacency matrices derived from spatial proximity or functional correlations that fundamentally capture statistical associations rather than directed causal influences, which conflicts with the inherently asymmetric, causally-driven nature of neural information flow. To bridge this gap, we propose GL-LFGNN, a Global-Local Dual-branch Causal Graph Neural Network grounded in Liang-Kleeman information flow theory. Unlike Granger causality that merely assesses temporal precedence, our approach rigorously quantifies causal strength from a dynamical systems perspective, yielding neurophysiologically interpretable directed graphs. A dual-branch architecture further integrates whole-brain connectivity with region-specific processing aligned to established functional neuroanatomy. On the MEEG dataset, GL-LFGNN achieves 86.17% (Arousal) and 86.71% (Valence) accuracy with only 37K parameters -- approximately 10% of the current state-of-the-art -- demonstrating that principled causal modeling can simultaneously enhance interpretability, generalization, and computational efficiency. Code will be released.

Ziyi Wang, Dongyang Kuang

Graph Neural Networks EEG Emotion Recognition

May 21, 2026cs.HC

Cross-Subject EEG Emotion Recognition Based on Temporal Asynchronous Alignment Contrastive Learning

With the advancement of science and technology, the importance of emotion research has become increasingly evident. Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition has emerged as an active research area in recent years, owing to its objectivity and high temporal resolution. However, most existing methods focus on optimizing encoder structures to enhance feature extraction capabilities, while paying relatively little attention to similarity calculation strategies, particularly overlooking the potential temporal misalignment of responses among different subjects. To address these shortcomings, this paper draws inspiration from the late interaction mechanism of ColBERT in natural language processing (NLP) and proposes a Temporal Asynchronous Alignment-based Contrastive Learning (TA2CL) framework. This method transforms the traditional global "hard alignment" similarity calculation approach into a fine-grained local matching mechanism, enabling the model to adaptively search for and align "locally highly correlated" segments between two EEG signals, thereby effectively mitigating the effects of inter-subject differences and temporal delays. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves strong performance across multiple public datasets. Specifically, on the FACED dataset, it achieves an accuracy of 64.5% for the nine-class classification task and 79.5% for the binary classification task, while on the SEED and SEED-V datasets, it achieves accuracies of 86.4% and 70.1%, respectively, validating the method's effectiveness and generalization capability.

Ying Xie, Yi Zheng, Zehui Xiao +2

School of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China

Cross-Subject EEG Decoding Contrastive Learning EEG Emotion Recognition

Mar 11, 2026cs.LG

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 Decoding Electroencephalography Prototype Learning EEG Emotion Recognition

Sep 1, 2025cs.LG

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 Decoding Prototype-Based Classification Domain Generalization Representation Disentanglement EEG Emotion Recognition