# Step-Aware Residual-Guided Diffusion for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19166 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19166/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 13 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-TS: Interpretable Diffusion for General Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01742/) (2024)
- [NeuroLM: A Universal Multi-task Foundation Model for Bridging the Gap between Language and EEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00101/) (2024)
- [TimeDP: Learning to Generate Multi-Domain Time Series with Domain Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05403/) (2025)
- [Generative AI Enables EEG Super-Resolution via Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Diffusion Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03089/) (2024)
- [Population Aware Diffusion for Time Series Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00910/) (2025)
- [DiffuSETS: 12-lead ECG Generation Conditioned on Clinical Text Reports and Patient-Specific Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05932/) (2025)
- [Temporal Residual Guided Diffusion Framework for Event-Driven Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10636/) (2024)
- [ESTformer: Transformer utilising spatiotemporal dependencies for electroencephalogram super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10052/) (2023)
- [Deep EEG Super-Resolution: Upsampling EEG Spatial Resolution with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08803/) (2025)
- [Self-attention-based Diffusion Model for Time-series Imputation in Partial Blackout Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01737/) (2025)
- [RDPI: A Refine Diffusion Probability Generation Method for Spatiotemporal Data Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12642/) (2024)
- [Prior-Guided Residual Diffusion: Calibrated and Efficient Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01330/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Geometry- and Relation-Aware Diffusion for EEG Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02238/) (2026)
- [On Approaches to Building Surrogate ODE Models for Diffusion Bridges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12671/) (2025)
- [EMAG: Differentiable 4D Gaussian Mixture Splatting for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29731/) (2026)
- [TGSD: Topology-Guided State-Space Diffusion Framework for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03998/) (2026)
- [Coordinate-Queryable Neural Field Reconstruction for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution with Unseen-Electrode Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23707/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For real-world BCI applications, lightweight Electroencephalography (EEG) systems offer the best cost-deployment balance. However, such spatial sparsity of EEG limits spatial fidelity, hurting learning and introducing bias. EEG spatial super-resolution methods aim to recover high-density EEG signals from sparse measurements, yet is often hindered by distribution shift and signal distortion and thus reducing fidelity and usability for EEG analysis and visualization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SRGDiff, a step-aware residual-guided diffusion model that formulates EEG spatial super-resolution as dynamic conditional generation. Our key idea is to learn a dynamic residual condition from the low-density input that predicts the step-wise temporal and spatial details to add and uses the evolving cue to steer the denoising process toward high density reconstructions. At each denoising step, the proposed residual condition is additively fused with the previous denoiser feature maps, then a step-dependent affine modulation scales and shifts the activation to produce the current features. This iterative procedure dynamically extracts step-wise temporal rhythms and spatial-topographic cues to steer high-density recovery and maintain a fidelity-consistency balance. We adopt a comprehensive evaluation protocol spanning signal-, feature-, and downstream-level metrics across SEED, SEED-IV, and Localize-MI and multiple upsampling scales. SRGDiff achieves consistent gains of up to 40% over strong baselines, proving its superiority in the task of EEG spatial super-resolution. Moreover, topographic visualizations comparison and substantial EEG-FID gains jointly indicate that our SR EEG mitigates the spatial-spectral shift between low- and high-density recordings. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhrLhj/ICLR2026SRGDiff.