# Progressive Graph Convolution Network for EEG Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07835/) (2019)
- [A Novel Bi-hemispheric Discrepancy Model for EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01704/) (2019)
- [Spatial-Temporal Recurrent Neural Network for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04515/) (2017)
- [Learning the Redundancy-free Features for Generalized Zero-Shot Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08939/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [M3D: Manifold-based Domain Adaptation with Dynamic Distribution for Non-Deep Transfer Learning in Cross-subject and Cross-session EEG-based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15615/) (2024)
- [Evaluation in EEG Emotion Recognition: State-of-the-Art Review and Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18175/) (2025)
- [FACE: Few-shot Adapter with Cross-view Fusion for Cross-subject EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18998/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Studies in the area of neuroscience have revealed the relationship between emotional patterns and brain functional regions, demonstrating that dynamic relationships between different brain regions are an essential factor affecting emotion recognition determined through electroencephalography (EEG). Moreover, in EEG emotion recognition, we can observe that clearer boundaries exist between coarse-grained emotions than those between fine-grained emotions, based on the same EEG data; this indicates the concurrence of large coarse- and small fine-grained emotion variations. Thus, the progressive classification process from coarse- to fine-grained categories may be helpful for EEG emotion recognition. Consequently, in this study, we propose a progressive graph convolution network (PGCN) for capturing this inherent characteristic in EEG emotional signals and progressively learning the discriminative EEG features. To fit different EEG patterns, we constructed a dual-graph module to characterize the intrinsic relationship between different EEG channels, containing the dynamic functional connections and static spatial proximity information of brain regions from neuroscience research. Moreover, motivated by the observation of the relationship between coarse- and fine-grained emotions, we adopt a dual-head module that enables the PGCN to progressively learn more discriminative EEG features, from coarse-grained (easy) to fine-grained categories (difficult), referring to the hierarchical characteristic of emotion. To verify the performance of our model, extensive experiments were conducted on two public datasets: SEED-IV and multi-modal physiological emotion database (MPED).