SleepPairNet: Learning Multimodal Pediatric Sleep Representations with Random-Pair Cross-Attention

Abstract

Analyzing physiological sleep signals is important for assessing sleep quality and detecting sleep-related disorders. Learning inter-modal relationships across physiological signals can provide richer representations for downstream sleep analysis. We introduce SleepPairNet, a multimodal self-supervised learning (SSL) framework that learns pairwise interactions between physiological signals through cross-attention. We propose a random modality-pair selection strategy that exposes the model to diverse signal pairs during pretraining, enabling flexibility across modality combinations at test time. Pretrained on the NCH dataset, SleepPairNet outperforms the evaluated SSL baselines on all respiratory tasks while remaining competitive on EEG-related tasks, and shows even stronger results when transferred to the external CHAT dataset.