This paper focuses on subject adaptation for EEG-based visual recognition. It aims at building a visual stimuli recognition system customized for the target subject whose EEG samples are limited, by transferring knowledge from abundant data of source subjects. Existing approaches consider the scenario that samples of source subjects are accessible during training. However, it is often infeasible and problematic to access personal biological data like EEG signals due to privacy issues. In this paper, we introduce a novel and practical problem setup, namely source-free subject adaptation, where the source subject data are unavailable and only the pre-trained model parameters are provided for subject adaptation. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose classifier-based data generation to simulate EEG samples from source subjects using classifier responses. Using the generated samples and target subject data, we perform subject-independent feature learning to exploit the common knowledge shared across different subjects. Notably, our framework is generalizable and can adopt any subject-independent learning method. In the experiments on the EEG-ImageNet40 benchmark, our model brings consistent improvements regardless of the choice of subject-independent learning. Also, our method shows promising performance, recording top-1 test accuracy of 74.6% under the 5-shot setting even without relying on source data. Our code can be found at https://github.com/DeepBCI/Deep-BCI/tree/master/1_Intelligent_BCI/Source_Free_Subject_Adaptation_for_EEG.
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