# SpGesture: Source-Free Domain-adaptive sEMG-based Gesture Recognition with Jaccard Attentive Spiking Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14398/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01243/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08150/) (2018)
- [SuperSpike: Supervised learning in multi-layer spiking neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.11146/) (2017)
- [Long short-term memory and learning-to-learn in networks of spiking neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09574/) (2018)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [RMP-SNN: Residual Membrane Potential Neuron for Enabling Deeper High-Accuracy and Low-Latency Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01811/) (2020)
- [Neural Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in NLP---A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00632/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [Accurate and efficient time-domain classification with adaptive spiking recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12593/) (2021)
- [Attention Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13929/) (2022)
- [Temporal-wise Attention Spiking Neural Networks for Event Streams Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11711/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Event-Based Optical Flow with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01862/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Deep Learning by Neighbourhood Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11567/) (2019)
- [Divide and Contrast: Source-free Domain Adaptation via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06612/) (2022)
- [Temporal-Coded Deep Spiking Neural Network with Easy Training and Robust Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10837/) (2019)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03152/) (2021)
- [Sparse Spiking Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08810/) (2021)
- [AutoSNN: Towards Energy-Efficient Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12738/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Neuron and Synapse Filter Dynamics in Spatial Temporal Learning of Deep Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02944/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Degree-Conscious Spiking Graph for Cross-Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06883/) (2024)
- [NeuroVLA: A Brain-inspired Embodied Intelligence for Fluid and Fast Reflexive Robotics Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14628/) (2026)
- [Source-Free Object Detection with Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11090/) (2025)
- [ViLAaD: Enhancing "Attracting and Dispersing'' Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Vision-and-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23529/) (2025)
- [Edge Intelligence with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14069/) (2025)
- [SPACE: SPike-Aware Consistency Enhancement for Test-Time Adaptation in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02298/) (2025)
- [S2M-Former: Spiking Symmetric Mixing Branchformer for Brain Auditory Attention Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05164/) (2025)
- [Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03666/) (2025)
- [Translating Signals to Languages for sEMG-Based Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22403/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Surface electromyography (sEMG) based gesture recognition offers a natural and intuitive interaction modality for wearable devices. Despite significant advancements in sEMG-based gesture-recognition models, existing methods often suffer from high computational latency and increased energy consumption. Additionally, the inherent instability of sEMG signals, combined with their sensitivity to distribution shifts in real-world settings, compromises model robustness. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel SpGesture framework based on Spiking Neural Networks, which possesses several unique merits compared with existing methods: (1) Robustness: By utilizing membrane potential as a memory list, we pioneer the introduction of Source-Free Domain Adaptation into SNN for the first time. This enables SpGesture to mitigate the accuracy degradation caused by distribution shifts. (2) High Accuracy: With a novel Spiking Jaccard Attention, SpGesture enhances the SNNs' ability to represent sEMG features, leading to a notable rise in system accuracy. To validate SpGesture's performance, we collected a new sEMG gesture dataset which has different forearm postures, where SpGesture achieved the highest accuracy among the baselines (89.26%). Moreover, the actual deployment on the CPU demonstrated a system latency below 100ms, well within real-time requirements. This impressive performance showcases SpGesture's potential to enhance the applicability of sEMG in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/guoweiyu/SpGesture/.