SSAS: Cross-subject EEG-based Emotion Recognition through Source Selection with Adversarial Strategy

Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals have long been applied in the field of affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs). Cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition has demonstrated significant potential in practical applications due to its suitability across diverse people. However, most studies on cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition neglect the presence of inter-individual variability and negative transfer phenomena during model training. To address this issue, a cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition through source selection with adversarial strategy is introduced in this paper. The proposed method comprises two modules: the source selection network (SS) and the adversarial strategies network (AS). The SS uses domain labels to reverse-engineer the training process of domain adaptation. Its key idea is to disrupt class separability and magnify inter-domain differences, thereby raising the classification difficulty and forcing the model to learn domain-invariant yet emotion-relevant representations. The AS gets the source domain selection results and the pretrained domain discriminators from SS. The pretrained domain discriminators compute a novel loss aimed at enhancing the performance of domain classification during adversarial training, ensuring the balance of adversarial strategies. This paper provides theoretical insights into the proposed method and achieves outstanding performance on two EEG-based emotion datasets, SEED and SEED-IV. The code can be found at https://github.com/liuyici/SSAS.