{"ID":5937614,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-07T03:14:33.014478982Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-08T06:29:58.138229053Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04139","arxiv_id":"2607.04139","title":"Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset EEG-Based Emotion Recognition","abstract":"Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization. However, its application to EEG-based emotion recognition remains largely unexplored. Existing SSL methods struggle to capture the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies of EEG signals under varying channel configurations, extract fine-grained representations resilient to noise, and derive global features that generalize well across subjects. To address these challenges, we propose Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning (MGCRL), a novel SSL framework specifically designed for EEG-based emotion recognition. Built upon a region-aware spatiotemporal encoder, MGCRL integrates generative and contrastive learning to achieve both fine-grained and global discriminative representations for cross-dataset generalization. MGCRL introduces three key designs: 1) a spatiotemporal encoder that incorporates region-based graph convolution to capture localized spatial and functional relationships, enhancing region-specific feature learning and mitigating the impact of varying EEG channel configurations across datasets; 2) a generative learning mechanism based on the joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that utilizes masked features to capture noise robustness fine-grained representations, improving the model's capability to characterize subtle emotional states; and 3) a contrastive learning strategy that leverages masked and original features to learn temporally stable and cross-subject-invariant representations across the same stimuli, boosting emotion discrimination and cross-subject generalization. Under these designs, MGCRL exhibits remarkable ability to learn universal representation. Extensive experiments involving pretraining on the large FACED dataset and fine-tuning on multiple SEED-series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MGCRL.","short_abstract":"Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization. However, its application to EEG-based emotion recognition remains largely unexplored. Existing SSL methods struggle to capture the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies of EEG signals...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04139","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.04139v1","authors":"[\"Huqin Weng\",\"Jiayang Huang\",\"Yimin Wen\",\"Jie Du\",\"Chi-Man Vong\",\"Chuangquan Chen\"]","published":"2026-07-05T06:44:17Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}