# CPEP: Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training Enhances Gesture Generalization on EMG Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at Benchmarking Self-Supervised Pre-training with Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12210/) (2024)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Wearables: A Surveying Tutorial on a Still Challenging Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14452/) (2024)

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

- [MyoSem: Aligning Electromyography with Natural-Language Action Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00174/) (2026)
- [KinEMbed: Decoding Kinematics from Electromyography via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04820/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hand gesture classification using high-quality structured data such as videos, images, and hand skeletons is a well-explored problem in computer vision. Leveraging low-power, cost-effective biosignals, e.g. surface electromyography (sEMG), allows for continuous gesture prediction on wearables. In this paper, we demonstrate that learning representations from weak-modality data that are aligned with those from structured, high-quality data can improve representation quality and enables zero-shot classification. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training (CPEP) framework to align EMG and pose representations, where we learn an EMG encoder that produces high-quality and pose-informative representations. We assess the gesture classification performance of our model through linear probing and zero-shot setups. Our model outperforms emg2pose benchmark models by up to 21% on in-distribution gesture classification and 72% on unseen (out-of-distribution) gesture classification.