# MyoSem: Aligning Electromyography with Natural-Language Action Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00174/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

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- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
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- [EMGBench: Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Adaptation for Electromyography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23625/) (2024)
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- [CPEP: Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training Enhances Gesture Generalization on EMG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04699/) (2025)
- [ReactEMG: Stable, Low-Latency Intent Detection from sEMG via Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19815/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Electromyography (EMG) records muscle activation for hand gesture recognition, prosthetic control, and wearable interaction. Existing EMG methods usually formulate hand action understanding as prediction over fixed gesture labels, leaving EMG signals and action-semantic text unaligned in a common feature space and limiting bidirectional querying between signals and hand-action descriptions. We present MyoSem, an EMG--action semantic alignment framework that maps hand EMG and multi-view natural-language action descriptions into a shared feature space for retrieval. MyoSem builds semantic prototypes from multi-view descriptions, encodes EMG with local activation-aware representations, and uses semantic queries to aggregate local EMG evidence for bidirectional EMG--text retrieval. We evaluate MyoSem under seven protocols on NinaPro DB2, EMG2Pose, and NinaPro DB2rightarrowDB3, covering random splits, user shifts, held-out action classes, and able-bodied-to-amputee transfer. Across this evaluation, MyoSem achieves the strongest overall bidirectional retrieval performance among the evaluated methods. Ablations and representation analyses show how semantic prototypes, activation-aware encoding, and semantic queries shape the learned space. Overall, MyoSem moves EMG hand action understanding from fixed-label recognition toward language-queryable semantic retrieval.