# EfficientECG: Cross-Attention with Feature Fusion for Efficient Electrocardiogram Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03804 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03804/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [ECG Heartbeat Classification: A Deep Transferable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00794/) (2018)
- [MINA: Multilevel Knowledge-Guided Attention for Modeling Electrocardiography Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11333/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electrocardiogram is a useful diagnostic signal that can detect cardiac abnormalities by measuring the electrical activity generated by the heart. Due to its rapid, non-invasive, and richly informative characteristics, ECG has many emerging applications. In this paper, we study novel deep learning technologies to effectively manage and analyse ECG data, with the aim of building a diagnostic model, accurately and quickly, that can substantially reduce the burden on medical workers. Unlike the existing ECG models that exhibit a high misdiagnosis rate, our deep learning approaches can automatically extract the features of ECG data through end-to-end training. Specifically, we first devise EfficientECG, an accurate and lightweight classification model for ECG analysis based on the existing EfficientNet model, which can effectively handle high-frequency long-sequence ECG data with various leading types. On top of that, we next propose a cross-attention-based feature fusion model of EfficientECG for analysing multi-lead ECG data with multiple features (e.g., gender and age). Our evaluations on representative ECG datasets validate the superiority of our model against state-of-the-art works in terms of high precision, multi-feature fusion, and lightweights.