Advancing Cross-Subject Domain Generalization in Brain–Computer Interfaces With Multiadversarial Strategies

A cross-subject domain generalization (DG) approach with multi-adversarial strategies (DGMA) is introduced to reduce brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) systems’ dependency on high-quality, subject-specific EEG data, making it adaptable to unseen domains. DGMA leverages annotated training data from other subjects and consists of three modules: (1) Prefeature extraction, enhancing EEG signal separability through preprocessing, data augmentation, and tangent space mapping; (2) Distribution feature updater, aligning inter-subject feature distributions with marginal maximum mean discrepancy (MMD); (3) Multi-adversarial training, initially using gradient reversal layer (GRL) to amplify domain differences and classification loss, allowing the model to learn diverse domain-specific features before minimizing these differences to balance domain transferability and discriminability. DGMA is capable of better capturing domain-specific features while achieving stronger generalization compared to traditional methods focused solely on minimizing domain differences. Validated on four motor imagery datasets, DGMA achieved state-of-the-art accuracies of 76.1% on BCI Competition IV 2a and 72.4% on the 002-2014 dataset. Additional tests on a private fatigue dataset and the SEED dataset yielded accuracies of 99.5% and 86.6%, respectively. The code can be found at https://github.com/liuyici/DGMA-BCI.