EEG-Fusion: Failure-Informed Source-Free Expert Routing for Robust Motor Imagery EEG Decoding

Subject-independent motor-imagery (MI) EEG decoding can exhibit subject-level failures even when average performance appears acceptable: under subject shift, a decoder can become an overconfident near-one-class predictor. This is especially problematic in source-free deployment, where target-user labels are unavailable during adaptation and expert selection. We present textitEEG-Fusion, a failure-informed decision-level fusion framework that treats source-free MI decoding as label-free reliability estimation over heterogeneous experts. EEG-Fusion applies subject-wise Euclidean alignment and normalization-only test-time adaptation, then routes each target subject to a neural, covariance-based, or physiological-feature expert using a reliability gate trained on source-held-out folds to predict expert performance and collapse risk from label-free stream diagnostics. The gate uses confidence, entropy, prediction diversity, expert agreement, and predicted class balance; collapse is measured as the maximum predicted class fraction. In 9-fold leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) evaluation with three seeds, relative to a no-alignment raw EEGNet source-free anchor, EEG-Fusion improves subject macro-F1 from 0.417 to 0.529 on BCI IV-2a local protocol, from 0.314 to 0.482 on BNCI2014-001, and from 0.607 to 0.708 on BNCI2014-004; corresponding collapse-index reductions are 0.199, 0.227, and 0.169. In a 9-subject Cho2017 external subset, EEG-Fusion improves macro-F1 from 0.516 to 0.630. These results suggest that label-free reliability estimation can reduce subject-level failure modes in source-free MI-EEG deployment.