GraTED: Graph--Tensor EEG Decoding for Passenger Hazard Perception in Autonomous Vehicles

Passenger electroencephalography (EEG) can reveal road risk through anticipatory responses before hazardous events and neural reactions around their onset. However, existing EEG decoding methods often map physiologically meaningful arrangement of electrodes onto artificial 2D grids and thus flatten the higher-order time-feature representations into matrices, obscuring meaningful structure in the data. To preserve and exploit the spatial and time-feature structure of EEG recordings, we propose the Graph-Tensor EEG Decoding Model (GraTED) for passenger risk prediction (RP) and danger identification (DI) in autonomous-vehicle scenarios. GraTED models the electrode arrangement as an undirected graph based on their scalp locations, using graph convolution to capture spatial dependencies and low-rank tensor classification to preserve the multidimensional time-feature structure, while controlling model complexity. Evaluated on the PassengerEEG dataset, comprising 11 participants and 45 hours of recordings, GraTED achieves the highest balanced accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art, across all three evaluation settings, while requiring the fewest learnable parameters among seven baseline methods.