Learning the relative composition of EEG signals using pairwise relative shift pretraining

Christopher Michael Sandino, Sayeri Lala, Geeling Chau, Melika Ayoughi, Juri Minxha, Ellen L. Zippi, Ali Moin, Behrooz Mahasseni, Erdrin Azemi, Hanlin Goh

Keywords: Electroencephalography, self-supervised learning, pretraining

TL;DR: We introduce PAirwise Relative Shift or PARS pretraining, a new self-supervised learning task that learns the relative composition of EEG signals by predicting relative temporal shifts between randomly sampled EEG window pairs.

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising approach for learning electroencephalography (EEG) representations from unlabeled data, reducing the need for expensive annotations for clinical applications like sleep staging and seizure detection. While current EEG SSL methods predominantly use masked reconstruction strategies like masked autoencoders (MAE) that capture local temporal patterns, position prediction pretraining remains underexplored despite its potential to learn long-range dependencies in neural signals. We introduce PAirwise Relative Shift or PARS pretraining, a novel pretext task that predicts relative temporal shifts between randomly sampled EEG window pairs. Unlike reconstruction-based methods that focus on local pattern recovery, PARS encourages encoders to capture relative temporal composition and long-range dependencies inherent in neural signals. Through comprehensive evaluation on various EEG decoding tasks, we demonstrate that PARS-pretrained transformers consistently outperform existing pretraining strategies in label-efficient and transfer learning settings, establishing a new paradigm for self-supervised EEG representation learning.

Submission Number: 27