Domain-aware domain-class adaptation network for motor execution to motor imagery EEG classification.

Introduction: Motor imagery (MI) is one of the most widely used paradigms in electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In recent years, deep learning and transfer learning techniques have been increasingly adopted to further improve MI-EEG decoding performance, thereby facilitating the practical deployment of BCIs. In transfer learning, the similarity between the source and target domains is a critical factor influencing its effectiveness. Given the analogous cortical activation patterns observed in MI and motor execution (ME) tasks, cross-task transfer learning from ME to MI presents a promising yet underexplored direction. Methods: To tackle the underexplored problem of cross-task transfer learning from ME to MI, we propose a domain-aware domain-class adaptation network (DDCA Net), which consists of a domain-shared feature extractor, two classifiers, and two domain-specific feature re-weighting blocks. Domain-level alignment is achieved by minimizing the maximum mean discrepancy between source and target feature distributions, while domain-specific feature re-weighting preserves discriminative characteristics unique to each task. In addition, a bi-classifier adversarial learning framework is employed to encourage consistency of decision boundaries across domains, thereby enabling implicit class-level alignment. Results: Extensive experiments were conducted on a public dataset with over 100 subjects under varying proportions of target-domain training samples. When 80% of target-domain samples are used for training, the proposed DDCA Net significantly outperforms the within-task baseline, achieving a 7.71% improvement in classification accuracy and converting approximately 80% of previously BCI-illiterate subjects into BCI-literate users. Discussion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to verify the feasibility of applying domain adaptation for cross-task transfer learning in MI-EEG classification. The findings of this study provide new insights for integrating ME and MI in advanced BCIs.