arXiv subjects

Xiaoqing Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaoqing Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Synthetic Data Generation for Brain-Computer Interfaces: Overview, Benchmarking, and Future Directions

Deep learning has achieved transformative performance across diverse domains, largely driven by large-scale and high-quality training data. In contrast, the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is fundamentally constrained by limited, heterogeneous, and privacy-sensitive neural recordings. Generating synthetic yet physiologically plausible brain signals has therefore emerged as a promising strategy to mitigate data scarcity, improve model generalization, and support data-efficient BCIs. This survey provides a comprehensive review of synthetic brain data generation for BCIs, covering methodological taxonomies, benchmark experiments, evaluation metrics, key applications, and future directions. We systematically categorize existing generation approaches into four types: signal-transformation-based, feature-based, model-based, and translation-based generation, and discuss their characteristics, advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, we benchmark representative brain signal generation approaches across four BCI paradigms, including motor imagery, epileptic seizure detection, steady-state visually evoked potentials, and auditory attention detection, to provide an objective comparison of their downstream utility. We also summarize evaluation principles for generated brain signals from multiple perspectives, including signal realism, physiological plausibility, downstream utility, and privacy preservation. Finally, we discuss the potential and challenges of current generation approaches and outline future research directions toward accurate, data-efficient, generalizable, and privacy-aware BCI systems. The benchmark codebase is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/DG4BCI.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

PAT: Privacy-Preserving Adversarial Transfer for Accurate, Robust and Privacy-Preserving EEG Decoding

An electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) enables direct communication between the brain and external devices. However, such systems face at least three major challenges in real-world applications: limited decoding accuracy, poor robustness, and privacy risks. Although prior studies have addressed one or two of these issues, methods that simultaneously improve accuracy, robustness, and privacy remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose Privacy-preserving Adversarial Transfer (PAT), a unified training framework that combines data alignment, adversarial training, and privacy-preserving transfer. PAT provides a single pipeline that can be instantiated under three privacy-preserving scenarios, i.e., centralized source-free transfer, federated source-free transfer, and transfer with privacy-preserved source data, while jointly improving accuracy and robustness. Experiments on five public EEG datasets under three privacy-preserving scenarios (centralized source-free transfer, federated source-free transfer, and transfer with privacy-preserved source data) show that PAT outperforms over ten classic and state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and robustness. PAT also outperformed leading transfer learning approaches that do not incorporate any privacy mechanisms by 9.76% in terms of average accuracy and robustness. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that simultaneously addresses all three major challenges in EEG-based BCIs. We believe this work can help motivate further research on more accurate, robust, and privacy-preserving EEG decoding.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

ConceptWeaver: Weaving Disentangled Concepts with Flow

Pre-trained flow-based models excel at synthesizing complex scenes yet lack a direct mechanism for disentangling and customizing their underlying concepts from one-shot real-world sources. To demystify this process, we first introduce a novel differential probing technique to isolate and analyze the influence of individual concept tokens on the velocity field over time. This investigation yields a critical insight: the generative process is not monolithic but unfolds in three distinct stages. An initial \textbf{Blueprint Stage} establishes low-frequency structure, followed by a pivotal \textbf{Instantiation Stage} where content concepts emerge with peak intensity and become naturally disentangled, creating an optimal window for manipulation. A final concept-insensitive refinement stage then synthesizes fine-grained details. Guided by this discovery, we propose \textbf{ConceptWeaver}, a framework for one-shot concept disentanglement. ConceptWeaver learns concept-specific semantic offsets from a single reference image using a stage-aware optimization strategy that aligns with the three-stage framework. These learned offsets are then deployed during inference via our novel ConceptWeaver Guidance (CWG) mechanism, which strategically injects them at the appropriate generative stage. Extensive experiments validate that ConceptWeaver enables high-fidelity, compositional synthesis and editing, demonstrating that understanding and leveraging the intrinsic, staged nature of flow models is key to unlocking precise, multi-granularity content manipulation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Heuristic Self-Paced Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation under Adverse Conditions

The learning order of semantic classes significantly impacts unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation, especially under adverse weather conditions. Most existing curricula rely on handcrafted heuristics (e.g., fixed uncertainty metrics) and follow a static schedule, which fails to adapt to a model's evolving, high-dimensional training dynamics, leading to category bias. Inspired by Reinforcement Learning, we cast curriculum learning as a sequential decision problem and propose an autonomous class scheduler. This scheduler consists of two components: (i) a high-dimensional state encoder that maps the model's training status into a latent space and distills key features indicative of progress, and (ii) a category-fair policy-gradient objective that ensures balanced improvement across classes. Coupled with mixed source-target supervision, the learned class rankings direct the network's focus to the most informative classes at each stage, enabling more adaptive and dynamic learning. It is worth noting that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used benchmarks (e.g., ACDC, Dark Zurich, and Nighttime Driving) and shows generalization ability in synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Low-Energy, Octave-Spanning Supercontinuum Generation in Ta_2O_5 Waveguides: Towards Optical Coherence Metrology

Supercontinuum generation (SCG) on integrated photonic platforms is a pivotal technology for developing next-generation chip-scale systems for precision spectroscopy and metrology. While significant progress has been made with silicon (Si) and silicon nitride ($Si_3N_4$) platforms, they are often constrained by two-photon absorption (TPA) or moderate nonlinear coefficients, necessitating a trade-off between energy efficiency and bandwidth. Tantalum pentoxide ($Ta_2O_5$), possessing both high nonlinearity and a wide bandgap, emerges as a promising candidate; however, current implementations remain challenged by high pump energy consumption. Here, we report a low-loss $Ta_2O_5$ integrated waveguide fabricated via the Damascene process. It enables the generation of a two-octave-spanning spectrum with a low pulse energy of only 92.9 pJ (60 fs, 1550 nm). Notably, the corresponding peak power is a mere 1.36 kW, which is nearly an order of magnitude lower than that of state-of-the-art comparable broadband sources. Furthermore, at the maximum pump energy, our spectrum exhibits an ultrabroad coverage from 450 nm to 3400 nm, spanning nearly three octaves. Supported by numerical simulations, we analyze the dynamics of soliton fission. Furthermore, a Michelson interferometry system developed using this source exhibits superior performance, achieving not only micrometer-scale axial resolution but also a 6 dB sensitivity roll-off length of 3.1 mm. This exceptional roll-off performance, combined with a displacement measurement sensitivity of 346 nm, underscores the immense potential of the $Ta_2O_5$ platform for applications in biomedical imaging and precision metrology.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2026

Highly Multivariate Large-scale Spatial Stochastic Processes -- A Cross-Markov Random Field Approach

Key challenges in the analysis of highly multivariate large-scale spatial stochastic processes, where both the number of components (p) and spatial locations (n) can be large, include achieving maximal sparsity in the joint precision matrix, ensuring efficient computational cost for its generation, accommodating asymmetric cross-covariance in the joint covariance matrix, and delivering scientific interpretability. We propose a cross-MRF model class, consisting of a mixed spatial graphical model framework and cross-MRF theory, to collectively address these challenges in one unified framework across two modelling stages. The first stage exploits scientifically informed conditional independence (CI) among p component fields and allows for a step-wise parallel generation of joint covariance and precision matrix, enabling a simultaneous accommodation of asymmetric cross-covariance in joint covariance matrix and sparsity in joint precision matrix. The second stage extends the first-stage CI to doubly CI among both p and n and unearths the cross-MRF via an extended Hammersley-Clifford theorem for multivariate spatial stochastic processes. This results in the sparsest possible representation of the joint precision matrix and ensures its lowest generation complexity. We demonstrate with 1D simulated comparative studies and 2D real-world data.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

RAICL: Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Vision-Language-Model Based EEG Seizure Detection

Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding is a critical component of medical diagnostics, rehabilitation engineering, and brain-computer interfaces. However, contemporary decoding methodologies remain heavily dependent on task-specific datasets to train specialized neural network architectures. Consequently, limited data availability impedes the development of generalizable large brain decoding models. In this work, we propose a paradigm shift from conventional signal-based decoding by leveraging large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to analyze EEG waveform plots. By converting multivariate EEG signals into stacked waveform images and integrating neuroscience domain expertise into textual prompts, we demonstrate that foundational VLMs can effectively differentiate between different patterns in the human brain. To address the inherent non-stationarity of EEG signals, we introduce a Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning (RAICL) approach, which dynamically selects the most representative and relevant few-shot examples to condition the autoregressive outputs of the VLM. Experiments on EEG-based seizure detection indicate that state-of-the-art VLMs under RAICL achieved better or comparable performance with traditional time series based approaches. These findings suggest a new direction in physiological signal processing that effectively bridges the modalities of vision, language, and neural activities. Furthermore, the utilization of off-the-shelf VLMs, without the need for retraining or downstream architecture construction, offers a readily deployable solution for clinical applications.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

SAFE: Secure and Accurate Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Brain-Computer Interfaces

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are widely adopted due to their efficiency and portability; however, their decoding algorithms still face multiple challenges, including inadequate generalization, adversarial vulnerability, and privacy leakage. This paper proposes Secure and Accurate FEderated learning (SAFE), a federated learning-based approach that protects user privacy by keeping data local during model training. SAFE employs local batch-specific normalization to mitigate cross-subject feature distribution shifts and hence improves model generalization. It further enhances adversarial robustness by introducing perturbations in both the input space and the parameter space through federated adversarial training and adversarial weight perturbation. Experiments on five EEG datasets from motor imagery (MI) and event-related potential (ERP) BCI paradigms demonstrated that SAFE consistently outperformed 14 state-of-the-art approaches in both decoding accuracy and adversarial robustness, while ensuring privacy protection. Notably, it even outperformed centralized training approaches that do not consider privacy protection at all. To our knowledge, SAFE is the first algorithm to simultaneously achieve high decoding accuracy, strong adversarial robustness, and reliable privacy protection without using any calibration data from the target subject, making it highly desirable for real-world BCIs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

On-chip quadratically nonlinear photodetector

Involving deterministically nonlinear photoresponse in on-chip photodetector is intriguing to develop sophisticated functions in photonic integrated circuits, such as in-sensor computing and optoelectronic mixing, though the corresponding devices are still lack of sufficient investigation. Here, we demonstrate an on-chip quadratically nonlinear photodetector (QNPD) by configuring an InSe p-i-n homojunction on a silicon waveguide. Telecom-band light guiding in the waveguide couples with the InSe evanescently and is frequency up-converted into visible light via InSe's second-harmonic generation (SHG), which is subsequently absorbed by InSe and finally generates photocurrent under the built-in electric field of the p-i-n homojunction. Governed by these sequential processes, the on-chip QNPD presents a quadratic function between photocurrent and optical power. Thanks to the efficient SHG and well-established homojunction in InSe, the QNPD reaches a high normalized responsivity of 37.1 A/W2 and low dark current of 1 pA, representing greatly improved performances among reported nonlinear photodetectors. Benefiting from the extra SHG process, the on-chip QNPD intrinsically incorporates light-light interactions, enabling straightforwardly monitoring all-optically mixing signals electrically. As an example, an array of 16-pixel QNPDs was designed to implement a fully single-shot on-chip autocorrelator without requirement of bulky optics and external cameras, which precisely measures picosecond pulses with high sensitivity of 6.1*10-10 W2.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

MVCNet: Multi-View Contrastive Network for Motor Imagery Classification

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable neural interaction by decoding brain activity for external communication. Motor imagery (MI) decoding has received significant attention due to its intuitive mechanism. However, most existing models rely on single-stream architectures and overlook the multi-view nature of EEG signals, leading to limited performance and generalization. We propose a multi-view contrastive network (MVCNet), a dual-branch architecture that parallelly integrates CNN and Transformer blocks to capture both local spatial-temporal features and global temporal dependencies. To enhance the informativeness of training data, MVCNet incorporates a unified augmentation pipeline across time, frequency, and spatial domains. Two contrastive modules are further introduced: a cross-view contrastive module that enforces consistency of original and augmented views, and a cross-model contrastive module that aligns features extracted from both branches. Final representations are fused and jointly optimized by contrastive and classification losses. Experiments on five public MI datasets across three scenarios demonstrate that MVCNet consistently outperforms nine state-of-the-art MI decoding networks, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization ability. MVCNet provides a robust solution for MI decoding by integrating multi-view information and dual-branch modeling, contributing to the development of more reliable BCI systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

AFPM: Alignment-based Frame Patch Modeling for Cross-Dataset EEG Decoding

Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding models for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) struggle with cross-dataset learning and generalization due to channel layout inconsistencies, non-stationary signal distributions, and limited neurophysiological prior integration. To address these issues, we propose a plug-and-play Alignment-Based Frame-Patch Modeling (AFPM) framework, which has two main components: 1) Spatial Alignment, which selects task-relevant channels based on brain-region priors, aligns EEG distributions across domains, and remaps the selected channels to a unified layout; and, 2) Frame-Patch Encoding, which models multi-dataset signals into unified spatiotemporal patches for EEG decoding. Compared to 17 state-of-the-art approaches that need dataset-specific tuning, the proposed calibration-free AFPM achieves performance gains of up to 4.40% on motor imagery and 3.58% on event-related potential tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first calibration-free cross-dataset EEG decoding framework, substantially enhancing the practicalness of BCIs in real-world applications.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Asymmetric Cross-Correlation in Multivariate Spatial Stochastic Processes: A Primer

Multivariate spatial phenomena are ubiquitous, spanning domains such as climate, pandemics, air quality, and social economy. Cross-correlation between different quantities of interest at different locations is asymmetric in general. This paper provides the visualization, structure, and properties of asymmetric cross-correlation as well as symmetric auto-correlation. It reviews mainstream multivariate spatial models and analyzes their capability to accommodate asymmetric cross-correlation. It also illustrates the difference in model accuracy with and without asymmetric accommodation using a 1D simulated example.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Multimodal Brain-Computer Interfaces: AI-powered Decoding Methodologies

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable direct communication between the brain and external devices. This review highlights the core decoding algorithms that enable multimodal BCIs, including a dissection of the elements, a unified view of diversified approaches, and a comprehensive analysis of the present state of the field. We emphasize algorithmic advancements in cross-modality mapping, sequential modeling, besides classic multi-modality fusion, illustrating how these novel AI approaches enhance decoding of brain data. The current literature of BCI applications on visual, speech, and affective decoding are comprehensively explored. Looking forward, we draw attention on the impact of emerging architectures like multimodal Transformers, and discuss challenges such as brain data heterogeneity and common errors. This review also serves as a bridge in this interdisciplinary field for experts with neuroscience background and experts that study AI, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding for AI-powered multimodal BCIs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Adversarial Filtering Based Evasion and Backdoor Attacks to EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables direct communication between the brain and an external device. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a common input signal for BCIs, due to its convenience and low cost. Most research on EEG-based BCIs focuses on the accurate decoding of EEG signals, while ignoring their security. Recent studies have shown that machine learning models in BCIs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper proposes adversarial filtering based evasion and backdoor attacks to EEG-based BCIs, which are very easy to implement. Experiments on three datasets from different BCI paradigms demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed attack approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first study on adversarial filtering for EEG-based BCIs, raising a new security concern and calling for more attention on the security of BCIs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

User-wise Perturbations for User Identity Protection in EEG-Based BCIs

Objective: An electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) is a direct communication pathway between the human brain and a computer. Most research so far studied more accurate BCIs, but much less attention has been paid to the ethics of BCIs. Aside from task-specific information, EEG signals also contain rich private information, e.g., user identity, emotion, disorders, etc., which should be protected. Approach: We show for the first time that adding user-wise perturbations can make identity information in EEG unlearnable. We propose four types of user-wise privacy-preserving perturbations, i.e., random noise, synthetic noise, error minimization noise, and error maximization noise. After adding the proposed perturbations to EEG training data, the user identity information in the data becomes unlearnable, while the BCI task information remains unaffected. Main results: Experiments on six EEG datasets using three neural network classifiers and various traditional machine learning models demonstrated the robustness and practicability of the proposed perturbations. Significance: Our research shows the feasibility of hiding user identity information in EEG data without impacting the primary BCI task information.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Alignment-Based Adversarial Training (ABAT) for Improving the Robustness and Accuracy of EEG-Based BCIs

Machine learning has achieved great success in electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Most existing BCI studies focused on improving the decoding accuracy, with only a few considering the adversarial security. Although many adversarial defense approaches have been proposed in other application domains such as computer vision, previous research showed that their direct extensions to BCIs degrade the classification accuracy on benign samples. This phenomenon greatly affects the applicability of adversarial defense approaches to EEG-based BCIs. To mitigate this problem, we propose alignment-based adversarial training (ABAT), which performs EEG data alignment before adversarial training. Data alignment aligns EEG trials from different domains to reduce their distribution discrepancies, and adversarial training further robustifies the classification boundary. The integration of data alignment and adversarial training can make the trained EEG classifiers simultaneously more accurate and more robust. Experiments on five EEG datasets from two different BCI paradigms (motor imagery classification, and event related potential recognition), three convolutional neural network classifiers (EEGNet, ShallowCNN and DeepCNN) and three different experimental settings (offline within-subject cross-block/-session classification, online cross-session classification, and pre-trained classifiers) demonstrated its effectiveness. It is very intriguing that adversarial attacks, which are usually used to damage BCI systems, can be used in ABAT to simultaneously improve the model accuracy and robustness.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

BSDA: Bayesian Random Semantic Data Augmentation for Medical Image Classification

Data augmentation is a crucial regularization technique for deep neural networks, particularly in medical image classification. Mainstream data augmentation (DA) methods are usually applied at the image level. Due to the specificity and diversity of medical imaging, expertise is often required to design effective DA strategies, and improper augmentation operations can degrade model performance. Although automatic augmentation methods exist, they are computationally intensive. Semantic data augmentation can implemented by translating features in feature space. However, over-translation may violate the image label. To address these issues, we propose \emph{Bayesian Random Semantic Data Augmentation} (BSDA), a computationally efficient and handcraft-free feature-level DA method. BSDA uses variational Bayesian to estimate the distribution of the augmentable magnitudes, and then a sample from this distribution is added to the original features to perform semantic data augmentation. We performed experiments on nine 2D and five 3D medical image datasets. Experimental results show that BSDA outperforms current DA methods. Additionally, BSDA can be easily assembled into CNNs or Transformers as a plug-and-play module, improving the network's performance. The code is available online at \url{https://github.com/YaoyaoZhu19/BSDA}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Matern Correlation: A Panoramic Primer

Matern correlation is of pivotal importance in spatial statistics and machine learning. This paper serves as a panoramic primer for this correlation with an emphasis on the exposition of its changing behavior and smoothness properties in response to the change of its two parameters. Such exposition is achieved through a series of simulation studies, the use of an interactive 3D visualization applet, and a practical modeling example, all tailored for a wide-ranging statistical audience. Meanwhile, the thorough understanding of these parameter-smoothness relationships, in turn, serves as a pragmatic guide for researchers in their real-world modeling endeavors, such as setting appropriate initial values for these parameters and parameter-fine-tuning in their Bayesian modeling practice or simulation studies involving the Matern correlation. Derived problems surrounding Matern, such as inconsistent parameter inference, extended forms of Matern and limitations of Matern, are also explored and surveyed to impart a panoramic view of this correlation.

stat.ME↗