ProtoGIB-Workload: Learning Workload-Specific Neural Topology Prototypes across Subjects
Yuzhe Zhang, Yixi Zhang, Shengdian Jiang, Chengxi Xie, Jihong Wang, Huan Liu, Man Yao, Minnan Luo, Chao Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10647 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10647 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10647
arXiv:2608.10647v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reliable electroencephalography (EEG)-based mental workload recognition is crucial for adaptive human-centered systems, yet practical deployment requires models to generalize to users unseen during training. Although functional connectivity graphs are widely adopted to capture workload-related neural interactions, they inherently entangle task-relevant structures with subject-specific physiological traits and sample-level noise. This entanglement often leads models to learn structural shortcuts, severely degrading cross-subject generalization. To address this, we propose ProtoGIB-Workload, a novel framework that explicitly regularizes and aligns graph structures for subject-independent workload recognition. Our approach introduces a Stochastic Graph Information Bottleneck (SGIB) to compress dense correlation priors into compact, task-relevant subgraphs, filtering out input-related redundancy. Crucially, to prevent the retention of subject-specific spurious edges, we propose a Class-Conditional Topology Stabilizer (CTS). Leveraging the fixed electrode coordinates of EEG data, CTS operates directly on graph-generation probabilities to encourage consistent edge-generation statistics across different subjects sharing the same workload class. Extensive experiments on two public EEG workload datasets and one in-house EEG cognitive load dataset of air traffic controllers under strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) protocols demonstrate that ProtoGIB-Workload significantly outperforms state-of-the-art temporal and graph-based baselines, improving the cross-subject Macro-F1 score by an average of 5.15% (up to 6.34%). Further analyses confirm that our method successfully extracts stable, cross-subject consistent neural connectivity patterns.
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“I don’t know what things are coming to,”
Babe Ruth sighed during spring training in 1931.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,”
he elaborated to reporters.
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Why?
Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball everyday.”
👉 The next day, Ruth and Lou Gehrig were struck out back-to-back by a 17-year-old girl.
Making their way home from preseason in Florid…