Multi-Source Domain Adaptation with Transformer-based Feature Generation for Subject-Independent EEG-based Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Although deep learning-based algorithms have demonstrated excellent performance in automated emotion recognition via electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, variations across brain signal patterns of individuals can diminish the model's effectiveness when applied across different subjects. While transfer learning techniques have exhibited promising outcomes, they still encounter challenges related to inadequate feature representations and may overlook the fact that source subjects themselves can possess distinct characteristics. In this work, we propose a multi-source domain adaptation approach with a transformer-based feature generator (MSDA-TF) designed to leverage information from multiple sources. The proposed feature generator retains convolutional layers to capture shallow spatial, temporal, and spectral EEG data representations, while self-attention mechanisms extract global dependencies within these features. During the adaptation process, we group the source subjects based on correlation values and aim to align the moments of the target subject with each source as well as within the sources. MSDA-TF is validated on the SEED dataset and is shown to yield promising results.