Retain and Adapt: Online Sequential EEG Classification with Subject Shift

Large variance exists in Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals with its pattern differing significantly across subjects. It is a challenging problem to perform online sequential decoding of EEG signals across different subjects, where a sequence of subjects arrive in temporal order and no signal data is jointly available beforehand. The challenges include the following two aspects: 1) the knowledge learned from previous subjects doesn’t readily fit to future subjects, and fast adaptation is needed in the process; 2) the EEG classifier could drastically erase information of learnt subjects as learning progresses, namely catastrophic forgetting. Most existing EEG decoding explorations use sizable data for pre-training purposes, and to the best of our knowledge we are the first to tackle this challenging online sequential decoding setting. In this work, we propose a unified bi-level meta-learning framework that enables the EEG decoder to simultaneously perform fast adaptation on future subjects and retain knowledge of previous subjects. In addition, we extend to the more general subject-agnostic scenario and propose a subject shift detection algorithm for situations that subject identity and the occurrence of subject shifts are unknown. We conducted experiments on three public EEG datasets for both subject-aware and subject-agnostic scenarios. The proposed method demonstrates its effectiveness in most of the ablation settings, e.g. an improvement of 5.73% for forgetting mitigation and 3.50% for forward adaptation on SEED dataset for subject agnostic scenarios.