MI-DABAN: A dual-attention-based adversarial network for motor imagery classification

The brain–computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used because of its convenience and safety. However, due to the distributional disparity between EEG signals, data from other subjects cannot be used directly to train a subject-specific classifier. For efficient use of the labeled data, domain transfer learning and adversarial learning are gradually applied to BCI classification tasks. While these methods improve classification performance, they only align globally and ignore task-specific class boundaries, which may lead to the blurring of features near the classification boundaries. Simultaneously, they employ fully shared generators to extract features, resulting in the loss of domain-specific information and the destruction of performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-attention-based adversarial network for motor imagery classification (MI-DABAN). Our framework leverages multiple subjects’ knowledge to improve a single subject’s motor imagery classification performance by cleverly using a novel adversarial learning method and two unshared attention blocks. Specifically, without introducing additional domain discriminators, we iteratively maximize and minimize the output difference between the two classifiers to implement adversarial learning to ensure accurate domain alignment. Among them, maximization is used to identify easily confused samples near the decision boundary, and minimization is used to align the source and target domain distributions. Moreover, for the shallow features from source and target domains, we use two non-shared attention blocks to preserve domain-specific information, which can prevent the negative transfer of domain information and further improve the classification performance on test data. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available EEG datasets, namely BCI Competition IV Datasets 2a and 2b. The experiment results demonstrate our method’s effectiveness and superiority.