MGFNet: A Multi-Granularity Fusion Network with Coupling-Guided Sparse Routing for Hybrid EEG-fNIRS Decoding

Hybrid brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have attracted growing research attention because they combine the millisecond-level temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) with the spatially informative hemodynamic responses of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). However, most existing deep fusion methods rely on static late-fusion strategies, which tend to underexploit latent cross-modal dependencies and are vulnerable to modality-specific signal degradation. To address these limitations, we propose MGFNet, a multi-granularity fusion network for hybrid BCI decoding. MGFNet contains three components: (1) intra-modal encoders that learn modality-specific spatiotemporal representations from EEG, oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO), and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) signals; (2) cross-modal interaction encoders that temporally align paired modalities and use dilated convolutions to capture long-range EEG-fNIRS dependencies; and (3) a Coupling-Guided Sparse Component Routing (CGSCR) module that estimates sample-specific cross-modal coupling and performs adaptive discrete routing. We further introduce a deep supervision strategy to stabilize optimization and improve branch-level discriminability. Under a within-subject held-out evaluation protocol on a public benchmark dataset, MGFNet achieved classification accuracies of 99.40% on the n-back task and 99.03% on the word generation (WG) task, outperforming representative comparison methods evaluated under a matched protocol. Ablation studies further confirmed the contributions of the intra-modal encoders, the cross-modal interaction encoders, and the CGSCR module. Under controlled EEG corruption with additive white Gaussian noise at −10 dB, MGFNet outperformed a static-fusion variant by 9.23 percentage points on the n-back task and 6.31 percentage points on the WG task. These results support the effectiveness of MGFNet in the present offline within-subject setting and indicate improved robustness under controlled single-modality degradation.