Unsupervised Domain Adaptation With Synchronized Self-Training for Cross- Domain Motor Imagery Recognition

Robust decoding performance is essential for the practical deployment of brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Existing EEG decoding models often rely on large amounts of annotated data collected through specific experimental setups, which fail to address the heterogeneity of data distributions across different domains. This limitation hinders BCI systems from effectively managing the complexity and variability of real-world data. To overcome these challenges, we propose Synchronized Self-Training Domain Adaptation (SSTDA) for cross-domain motor imagery classification. Specifically, SSTDA leverages labeled signals from a source domain and applies self-training to unlabeled signals from a target domain, enabling the simultaneous training of a more robust classifier. The raw EEG signals are mapped into a latent space by a feature extractor for discriminative representation learning. A domain-shared latent space is then learned by optimizing the feature extractor with both source and target samples, using an easy-tohard self-training process. We validate the method with extensive experiments on two public motor imagery datasets: Dataset IIa of BCI Competition IV and the High Gamma dataset. In the inter-subject task, our method achieves classification accuracies of 64.43% and 80.40%, respectively. It also outperforms existing methods in the inter-session task. Moreover, we develope a new six-class motor imagery dataset and achieve test accuracies of 77.09% and 80.18% across different datasets. All experimental results demonstrate that our SSTDA outperforms existing algorithms in inter-session, inter-subject, and inter-dataset validation protocols, highlighting its capability to learn discriminative, domain-invariant representations that enhance EEG decoding performance.