# MSCGC-KAN: Multi-scale Causal Graph Convolution and KAN-inspired Analytic-basis Mapping for EEG Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26624 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26624/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [EEGNet: A Compact Convolutional Network for EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08024/) (2016)
- [Large Brain Model for Learning Generic Representations with Tremendous EEG Data in BCI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18765/) (2024)
- [CBraMod: A Criss-Cross Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07236/) (2024)
- [EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07835/) (2019)
- [Transformer-based Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11170/) (2021)
- [REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG -- Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21585/) (2025)
- [Transformer Convolutional Neural Networks for Automated Artifact Detection in Scalp EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02405/) (2022)
- [CSBrain: A Cross-scale Spatiotemporal Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23075/) (2025)
- [Identifying Stable Patterns over Time for Emotion Recognition from EEG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02197/) (2016)
- [MsEmoTTS: Multi-scale emotion transfer, prediction, and control for emotional speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06460/) (2022)
- [Cross-Database Micro-Expression Recognition: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07742/) (2018)
- [MASA-TCN: Multi-anchor Space-aware Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks for Continuous and Discrete EEG Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16207/) (2023)
- [GEFM: Graph-Enhanced EEG Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19507/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition is an important affective computing task, and recent EEG foundation models provide useful generic representations for downstream adaptation. However, under the fine-tuning setting, three limitations remain prominent: insufficient modeling of multi-scale emotional dynamics, inadequate exploitation of inter-channel functional connectivity, and the limited expressive power of simple linear classification heads. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new EEG emotion recognition method, termed MSCGC-KAN, which introduces a structured task head composed of multi-scale causal graph convolution and Kolmogorov--Arnold feature mapping. Built on a pre-trained CBraMod backbone, MSCGC-KAN enhances downstream adaptation by jointly strengthening multi-scale temporal modeling, learnable inter-channel connectivity modeling, and nonlinear discriminative mapping within a compact task-specific head. This design preserves the representation advantage of the foundation model while making the classifier more sensitive to emotion-related spatiotemporal patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public FACED and SEED-VII datasets. The proposed method achieves a balanced accuracy of 60.66%, a Cohen's Kappa of 0.5525, and a weighted F1-score of 60.40% on FACED, and obtains 33.27%, 0.2223, and 33.64%, respectively, on SEED-VII. Compared with the CBraMod+Linear baseline, the balanced accuracy is improved by 5.91 and 2.03 percentage points on the two datasets, respectively. These results indicate that structured task-head design is an effective way to improve EEG emotion recognition when fine-tuning pre-trained EEG models.