Path Adversarial Dual-Branch Network for EEG Emotion Recognition

To address cross-subject domain shift and insufficient complementary fusion of time-frequency information in EEG-based emotion recognition, this paper proposes a multi-task adversarial network: Path Adversarial Dual-Branch Network for EEG Emotion Recognition (PADB-Net). The model adopts a dual-branch parallel architecture for time and frequency domains, processing raw EEG waveforms and differential entropy features respectively, and extracts discriminative features using lightweight depthwise separable convolutions and channel attention. A path adversarial module is introduced for the first time in emotion recognition to align time-domain and frequency-domain feature distributions, solving the single-branch dominance problem in dual-branch fusion. Together with a domain adversarial module, the overall distributions of source and target domains as well as the internal distributions of the two modality branches are aligned within a unified framework. Experiments on a dataset containing healthy subjects and patients with major depressive disorder show that the full model significantly outperforms single-adversarial and non-adversarial baselines in accuracy, AUC, F1-score, sensitivity, and specificity, verifying the synergistic gain of the dual-adversarial mechanism. On the HybridBCI dataset, PADB-Net achieves 77.80% accuracy, 84.50% AUC, and 79.40% F1-score with only 6.45 K trainable parameters. When transferred to the public SEED dataset for three-class emotion recognition, the model attains F1-scores of 71.83% (negative), 68.99% (neutral), and 73.37% (positive), demonstrating strong cross-dataset generalizability.