Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) lets EEG decoders learn from recordings of several subjects without pooling them. We consider two light EEG decoders, the Riemannian SPDNet and the Euclidean EEGNet. Both split into a trunk, which builds a latent representation, and a head, which classifies it. Inter-subject variability, however, makes a single shared FL model a poor fit for each subject. Personalised FL addresses this: all subjects learn a common trunk, and each subject keeps its own head. We adapt it for SPDNet and study its effects against standard FL and centralised training, with EEGNet as a Euclidean baseline. Experiments cover three motor-imagery datasets that span diverse regimes in channels, subjects and classes. We observe that personalised SPDNet reaches higher accuracy than both standard FL and centralised training, while converging in fewer rounds and communicating fewer parameters than standard FL. It also outperforms every EEGNet configuration on two of the three datasets, although centralised EEGNet outperforms centralised SPDNet.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche
OpenAlex ID: W7214292535