An Enhanced Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Cross-Dataset EEG Emotion Recognition via Predictive Coding and Test-Time Training

Abstract

EEG-based emotion recognition is widely used in affective computing but suffers from poor generalization due to domain shifts caused by inter-subject variability, dataset differences, and recording conditions, especially in cross-dataset settings. Conventional unsupervised domain adaptation methods require source data, which is often unavailable due to privacy constraints. Although source-free UDA addresses this limitation, existing methods still struggle with large domain gaps, noisy pseudo-labels, and unstable adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SF-UDA) framework for cross-dataset EEG emotion recognition. The framework introduces a non-contrastive predictive coding-based self-supervised pretraining strategy to learn robust and transferable EEG representations by modeling temporal dependencies in a reconstruction-based manner. During adaptation, we estimate target-domain structure through class-wise clustering and prediction disagreement, and optimize the model using a dual-stage strategy consisting of Multi-Loss Adaptive Regularization and Localized Consistency Learning, improving stability and neighborhood consistency under noisy pseudo-labels. We also propose a lightweight test-time training mechanism that enables selective online updates for uncertain samples using predictive reconstruction loss and entropy minimization. Experiments on DEAP, SEED, and DREAMER show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art SF-UDA methods, achieving 69.56% and 63.03% accuracy on SEED and DREAMER when trained on DEAP, and 61.38% and 68.90% when trained on SEED.