RUNet: A Zero-Calibration Framework for Cross-Domain EEG Decoding via Riemannian and Unsupervised Representation Learning.

Abstract

Inter-session and inter-subject variability in electroencephalography (EEG) signals, resulting from individual differences and environmental factors, poses a major challenge for neural decoding in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To address this issue, we propose RUNet, a zero-calibration motor imagery EEG decoding framework based on Riemannian manifold learning and unsupervised representation learning. RUNet incorporates a multi-scale spatiotemporal convolutional module that jointly captures local global spatial and multi-resolution temporal dynamics features. To enhance the robustness of EEG features against non stationarity, a polysynergistic covariance optimization module is employed, which strengthens the covariance matrix representation through multiple regularizations and adaptive fusion. In addition, RUNet integrates the Riemannian Affine Log Mapping layer, based on Affine-Invariant Transformation and Log-Euclidean Mapping, in an end-to-end manner to mitigate cross-domain covariance drift and enhance domain-invariant feature learning. A transfer learning framework is further integrated into RUNet: during pre-training, an unsupervised contrastive loss is applied to resting-state EEG data to learn domain-invariant spatiotemporal features; during retraining, task-specific data are used to enhance discriminability and feature disentanglement. Experimental results on the BCI Competition IV 2a, 2b datasets and a self-collected laboratory dataset show that RUNet achieves average cross-session accuracies of 87.19%, 88.03% and 85.45%, and cross-subject accuracies of 68.09%, 78.29% and 87.25%, respectively. On the PhysioNet dataset, a cross-subject accuracy of 78.14% is achieved. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of RUNet's unified pipeline and its robust cross-domain generalization.