# EEG-SCMM: Soft Contrastive Masked Modeling for Cross-Corpus EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09186/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [Time-Series Representation Learning via Temporal and Contextual Contrasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14112/) (2021)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07835/) (2019)
- [Exploring Contrastive Learning in Human Activity Recognition for Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11542/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning of Subject-Invariant EEG Representations for Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09559/) (2021)
- [Mixing Up Contrastive Learning: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09270/) (2022)
- [Survey on Emotional Body Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07481/) (2018)
- [A Novel Bi-hemispheric Discrepancy Model for EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01704/) (2019)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning Applied to Online Patient Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05142/) (2021)
- [MS-MDA: Multisource Marginal Distribution Adaptation for Cross-subject and Cross-session EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07740/) (2021)
- [A Novel Transferability Attention Neural Network Model for EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09585/) (2020)
- [Joint Contrastive Learning with Feature Alignment for Cross-Corpus EEG-based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09559/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Cross-Dataset EEG Emotion Recognition: A Novel Approach with Emotional EEG Style Transfer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16540/) (2024)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Multi-dataset Joint Pre-training of Emotional EEG Enables Generalizable Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22197/) (2025)
- [Boundary-aware Prototype-driven Adversarial Alignment for Cross-Corpus EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion recognition using electroencephalography (EEG) signals has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, existing methods often lack generalization in cross-corpus settings, where a model trained on one dataset is directly applied to another without retraining, due to differences in data distribution and recording conditions. To tackle the challenge of cross-corpus EEG-based emotion recognition, we propose a novel framework termed Soft Contrastive Masked Modeling (SCMM). Grounded in the theory of emotional continuity, SCMM integrates soft contrastive learning with a hybrid masking strategy to effectively capture emotion dynamics (refer to short-term continuity). Specifically, in the self-supervised learning stage, we propose a soft weighting mechanism that assigns similarity scores to sample pairs, enabling fine-grained modeling of emotional transitions and capturing the temporal continuity of human emotions. To further enhance representation learning, we design a similarity-aware aggregator that fuses complementary information from semantically related samples based on pairwise similarities, thereby improving feature expressiveness and reconstruction quality. This dual design contributes to a more discriminative and transferable representation, which is crucial for robust cross-corpus generalization. Extensive experiments on the SEED, SEED-IV, and DEAP datasets show that SCMM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming the second-best method by an average accuracy of 4.26% under both same-class and different-class cross-corpus settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kyler-RL/SCMM.