EmT: A Novel Transformer for Generalized Cross-subject EEG Emotion Recognition

Integrating prior knowledge of neurophysiology into neural network architecture enhances the performance of emotion decoding. While numerous techniques emphasize learning spatial and short-term temporal patterns, there has been limited emphasis on capturing the vital long-term contextual information associated with emotional cognitive processes. In order to address this discrepancy, we introduce a novel transformer model called emotion transformer (EmT). EmT is designed to excel in both generalized cross-subject EEG emotion classification and regression tasks. In EmT, EEG signals are transformed into a temporal graph format, creating a sequence of EEG feature graphs using a temporal graph construction module (TGC). A novel residual multi-view pyramid GCN module (RMPG) is then proposed to learn dynamic graph representations for each EEG feature graph within the series, and the learned representations of each graph are fused into one token. Furthermore, we design a temporal contextual transformer module (TCT) with two types of token mixers to learn the temporal contextual information. Finally, the task-specific output module (TSO) generates the desired outputs. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show that EmT achieves higher results than the baseline methods for both EEG emotion classification and regression tasks. The code is available atthis https URL.

@article{ding2025_2406.18345,
  title={ EmT: A Novel Transformer for Generalized Cross-subject EEG Emotion Recognition },
  author={ Yi Ding and Chengxuan Tong and Shuailei Zhang and Muyun Jiang and Yong Li and Kevin Lim Jun Liang and Cuntai Guan },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18345},
  year={ 2025 }
}