Generative diffusion meets domain adaptation: a framework for EEG cross-subject motor imagery classification.

Abstract

Cross-subject motor imagery classification remains challenging due to EEG data scarcity and inter-subject variability. This study proposes a novel framework integrating generative data augmentation with domain adaptation. First, we employ a diffusion probabilistic model to generate high-fidelity synthetic EEG samples, effectively enriching the training data. Subsequently, we propose the AMSC-DANN architecture, which synergizes an Adaptive Multi-Scale Convolution (AMSC) module for extracting multi-granular features with a Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN). This combination enables the model to learn discriminative temporal-spectral representations while simultaneously aligning feature distributions across different subjects. Extensive experiments on BCI Competition IV datasets 2a and 2b demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating its effectiveness in enhancing cross-subject generalization.