# Unsupervised domain transfer: Overcoming signal degradation in sleep monitoring by increasing scoring realism

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13988 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13988/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [SleepTransformer: Automatic Sleep Staging with Interpretability and Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11043/) (2021)
- [Automatic Sleep Staging of EEG Signals: Recent Development, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08446/) (2021)
- [Dreem Open Datasets: Multi-Scored Sleep Datasets to compare Human and Automated sleep staging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03221/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Robust Speech Recognition via Variational Autoencoder-Based Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06265/) (2017)
- [U-Sleep's resilience to AASM guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11173/) (2022)
- [Personalized Automatic Sleep Staging with Single-Night Data: a Pilot Study with KL-Divergence Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11349/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Objective: Investigate whether hypnogram 'realism' can be used to guide an unsupervised method for handling arbitrary types of signal degradation in mobile sleep monitoring. Approach: Combining a pretrained, state-of-the-art 'u-sleep' model with a 'discriminator' network, we align features from a target domain with a feature space learned during pretraining. To test the approach, we distort the source domain with realistic signal degradations, to see how well the method can adapt to different types of degradation. We compare the performance of the resulting model with best-case models designed in a supervised manner for each type of transfer. Main Results: Depending on the type of distortion, we find that the unsupervised approach can increase Cohen's kappa with as little as 0.03 and up to 0.29, and that for all transfers, the method does not decrease performance. However, the approach never quite reaches the estimated theoretical optimal performance, and when tested on a real-life domain mismatch between two sleep studies, the benefit was insignificant. Significance: 'Discriminator-guided fine tuning' is an interesting approach to handling signal degradation for 'in the wild' sleep monitoring, with some promise. In particular, what it says about sleep data in general is interesting. However, more development will be necessary before using it 'in production'.