Emotion recognition is essential in the diagnosis and rehabilitation of various mental diseases. In the last decade, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition has been intensively investigated due to its prominative accuracy and reliability, and graph convolutional network (GCN) has become a mainstream model to decode emotions from EEG signals. However, the electrode relationship, especially long-range electrode dependencies across the scalp, may be underutilized by GCNs, although such relationships have been proven to be important in emotion recognition. The small receptive field makes shallow GCNs only aggregate local nodes. On the other hand, stacking too many layers leads to over-smoothing. To solve these problems, we propose the pyramidal graph convolutional network (PGCN), which aggregates features at three levels: local, mesoscopic, and global. First, we construct a vanilla GCN based on the 3D topological relationships of electrodes, which is used to integrate two-order local features; Second, we construct several mesoscopic brain regions based on priori knowledge and employ mesoscopic attention to sequentially calculate the virtual mesoscopic centers to focus on the functional connections of mesoscopic brain regions; Finally, we fuse the node features and their 3D positions to construct a numerical relationship adjacency matrix to integrate structural and functional connections from the global perspective. Experimental results on four public datasets indicate that PGCN enhances the relationship modelling across the scalp and achieves stateof-the-art performance in both subject-dependent and subjectindependent scenarios. Meanwhile, PGCN makes an effective trade-off between enhancing network depth and receptive fields while suppressing the ensuing over-smoothing. Our codes are publicly accessible athttps://github.com/Jinminbox/PGCN.

It is vital to develop general models that can be shared across subjects and sessions in the real-world deployment of electroencephalogram (EEG) emotion recognition systems. Many prior studies have exploited domain adaptation algorithms to alleviate the inter-subject and inter-session discrepancies of EEG distributions. However, these methods only aligned the global domain divergence, but overlooked the local domain divergence with respect to each emotion category. This degenerates the emotion-discriminating ability of the domain invariant features. In this paper, we argue that aligning the EEG data within the same emotion categories is important for generalizable and discriminative features. Hence, we propose the dynamic domain adaptation (DDA) algorithm where the global and local divergences are disposed by minimizing the global domain discrepancy and local subdomain discrepancy, respectively. To tackle the absence of emotion labels in the target domain, we introduce a dynamic training strategy where the model focuses on optimizing the global domain discrepancy in the early training steps, and then gradually switches to the local subdomain discrepancy. The DDA algorithm is formally implemented as an unsupervised version and a semi-supervised version for different experimental settings. Based on the coarse-to-fine alignment, our model achieves the average peak accuracy of 91.08%, 92.89% on SEED, and 81.58%, 80.82% on SEED-IV in the cross-subject and cross-session scenarios, respectively.

The Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based emotion recognition is promising yet limited by the requirement of a large number of training data. Collecting substantial labeled samples in the training trials is the key to the generalization on the test trials. This process is time-consuming and laborious. In recent years, several studies have proposed various semisupervised learning (e.g., active learning) and transfer learning (e.g., domain adaptation, style transfer mapping) methods to alleviate the requirement on training data. However, most of them are iterative methods, which need considerable training time and are unfeasible in practice. To tackle this problem, we present the Fast Online Instance Transfer (FOIT) for improved affective Brain-computer Interface (aBCI). FOIT selects auxiliary data from historical sessions and (or) other subjects heuristically, which are then combined with the training data for supervised training. The predictions on the test trials are made by an ensemble classifier. As a one-shot algorithm, FOIT avoids the time-consuming iterations. Experimental results show that FOIT brings significant improvement in accuracy for the three-category classification (1%-8%) on the SEED dataset and four-category classification (1%-14%) on the SEED-IV dataset in the cross-subject, cross-session and cross-all scenarios. The time cost over the baselines is moderate (~35s on average for our machine). In contrast, to achieve comparative accuracies, the iterative methods require much more time (~45s - ~900s). FOIT provides a simple, fast and practically feasible solution to improve the generalization of aBCIs and allows various choices of classifiers without constraints. Our codes are available online.