User identification technologies are essential for ensuring security and privacy. Compared to conventional biometric identification methods, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brainprint recognition provides unique advantages, including non-replicability, resistance to coercion, and inherent liveness detection. However, existing EEG-based brainprint recognition methods are typically tailored for specific tasks and evaluated under conditions that differ substantially from real-world use. To overcome these limitations, we propose BrainprintNet, a convolutional neural network architecture integrating fine-grained filter banks, grouped multiscale temporal convolutions, and cross-band spatial fusion to enhance EEG-based brainprint recognition. BrainprintNet surpasses previous architectures in challenging scenarios involving simultaneous cross-session and cross-task recognition, demonstrating its generalization ability under strict simulation for real-world applications. Comprehensive experiments were conducted using three publicly available datasets encompassing nine distinct tasks. Furthermore, visualization of the learned network weights revealed strong correlations between user identity and specific EEG frequency subbands and channels. The proposed BrainprintNet significantly advances the accuracy, flexibility, and practical applicability of EEG-based brainprint recognition systems.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transform spontaneous/evoked neural activity into control commands for external communication. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remain the mainstream backbone for EEG decoding, their inherently short receptive field makes it difficult to capture long-range temporal dependencies and global inter-channel relationships. Recent CNN-Transformer (Conformer) hybrids partially address this issue, but most adopt a serial design, resulting in suboptimal integration of local and global features, and often overlook explicit channel-wise modeling. To address these limitations, we propose DBConformer, a dual-branch convolutional Transformer network tailored for EEG decoding. It integrates a temporal Conformer to model long-range temporal dependencies and a spatial Conformer to extract inter-channel interactions, capturing both temporal dynamics and spatial patterns in EEG signals. A lightweight channel attention module further refines spatial representations by assigning data-driven importance to EEG channels. Extensive experiments under four evaluation settings on three paradigms, including motor imagery, seizure detection, and steady-state visual evoked potential, demonstrated that DBConformer consistently outperformed 13 competitive baseline models, with over an eight-fold reduction in parameters than current high-capacity EEG Conformer architecture. Furthermore, the visualization results confirmed that the features extracted by DBConformer are physiologically interpretable and aligned with prior knowledge. The superior performance and interpretability of DBConformer make it reliable for accurate, robust, and explainable EEG decoding.

The cross-task gap presents a significant challenge for multimodal models because of the differences in input-output workflows. For instance, multimodal pre-trained transformers may encounter uni-modal data during testing. To mitigate the gap, this paper introduces a Transformer in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis under Missing Modalities (TMMM) aims to perform well using missing-modal data during testing. TMMM uses a missing multimodal training approach to prevent accuracy degradation in testing. At the same time, a new network architecture allows the model to reconstruct missing modalities during testing. Classification token fusion and Mixture-of-Experts structures further enhance the model’s performance. A pre-training method utilizing contrastive learning, which can construct negative samples with positive samples, is proposed to overcome insufficient labeled data. Our experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of TMMM on two datasets with no modalities missing, i.e., it consistently achieved the highest classification accuracy and Macro-F1, which outperformed the best state-of-the-art baseline on each dataset by about 2% and 2.5%. Additionally, TMMM usually performs better than other baselines on datasets with missing modalities during testing.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) aim to simulate real neural networks in the human brain with biologically plausible neurons. The leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron is one of the most widely studied SNN architectures . However, it has the vanishing gradient problem when trained with backpropagation . Additionally, its neuronal parameters are often manually specified and fixed, in contrast to the heterogeneity of real neurons in the human brain. This paper proposes a gated parametric neuron (GPN) to process spatio-temporal information effectively with the gating mechanism. Compared with the LIF neuron, the GPN has two distinguishing advantages: (1) it copes well with the vanishing gradients by improving the flow of gradient propagation; and, (2) it learns spatio-temporal heterogeneous neuronal parameters automatically. Additionally, we use the same gate structure to eliminate initial neuronal parameter selection and design a hybrid recurrent neural network-SNN structure. Experiments on two spike-based audio datasets demonstrated that the GPN network outperformed several state-of-the-art SNNs, could mitigate vanishing gradients, and had spatio-temporal heterogeneous parameters. Our work shows the ability of SNNs to handle long-term dependencies and achieve high performance simultaneously.