# Enhancing Low-Density EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces with Similarity-Keeping Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Distillation for medical imaging, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 19 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for medical imaging](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-medical-imaging/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [Variational Information Distillation for Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05835/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation and Student-Teacher Learning for Visual Intelligence: A Review and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05937/) (2020)
- [Towards Understanding Ensemble, Knowledge Distillation and Self-Distillation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09816/) (2020)
- [Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01802/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [Cross-Layer Distillation with Semantic Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03236/) (2020)
- [End-to-end learnable EEG channel selection for deep neural networks with Gumbel-softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09050/) (2021)
- [Distilling EEG Representations via Capsules for Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00104/) (2021)
- [A Deep Knowledge Distillation framework for EEG assisted enhancement of single-lead ECG based sleep staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07252/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BRIDGE-EEG: Bridging Self-Supervised Pretraining and Efficient Deployment for Cross-Dataset EEG Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electroencephalogram (EEG) has been one of the common neuromonitoring modalities for real-world brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) because of its non-invasiveness, low cost, and high temporal resolution. Recently, light-weight and portable EEG wearable devices based on low-density montages have increased the convenience and usability of BCI applications. However, loss of EEG decoding performance is often inevitable due to reduced number of electrodes and coverage of scalp regions of a low-density EEG montage. To address this issue, we introduce knowledge distillation (KD), a learning mechanism developed for transferring knowledge/information between neural network models, to enhance the performance of low-density EEG decoding. Our framework includes a newly proposed similarity-keeping (SK) teacher-student KD scheme that encourages a low-density EEG student model to acquire the inter-sample similarity as in a pre-trained teacher model trained on high-density EEG data. The experimental results validate that our SK-KD framework consistently improves motor-imagery EEG decoding accuracy when number of electrodes deceases for the input EEG data. For both common low-density headphone-like and headband-like montages, our method outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods across various EEG decoding model architectures. As the first KD scheme developed for enhancing EEG decoding, we foresee the proposed SK-KD framework to facilitate the practicality of low-density EEG-based BCI in real-world applications.