Learning Generalizable Action Representations via Pre-training AEMG

📅 2026-05-05
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenges of data heterogeneity, label scarcity, and the absence of a unified representation in electromyography (EMG) signals across users, devices, and tasks. To this end, we propose AEMG—the first large-scale self-supervised representation learning framework tailored for EMG. Our approach uniquely models neuromuscular dynamics as a “physiological language,” leveraging a Neuromuscular Contraction Tokenizer (NCT) to discretize continuous EMG signals into “words” and “sentences,” thereby constructing the largest cross-device EMG vocabulary to date. AEMG introduces a unified self-supervised pretraining paradigm that accommodates arbitrary channel topologies and sampling rates. Experiments demonstrate that AEMG improves accuracy by 5.79–9.25% under zero-shot leave-one-user-out evaluation and achieves over 90% few-shot adaptation performance using only 5% of target-user data.
📝 Abstract
A fundamental role in decoding human motor intent and enabling intuitive human-computer interaction is played by electromyography (EMG). However, its generalization capability across subjects, devices, and tasks remains substantially limited by data heterogeneity, label scarcity, and the lack of a unified representational framework. To bridge this gap, we propose Any Electromyography (AEMG), the first large-scale, self-supervised representation learning framework for EMG. AEMG reconceptualizes neuromuscular dynamics linguistically, utilizing a novel Neuromuscular Contraction Tokenizer (NCT) to translate discrete muscle contractions into structural words and temporal activation patterns into coherent sentences. Furthermore, we compile the largest cross-device EMG signal vocabulary to date, enabling seamless transfer across arbitrary channel topologies and sampling rates. Experiments demonstrate that AEMG improves the zero-shot leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) accuracy by 5.79-9.25% compared to six state-of-the-art baselines, and achieves more than 90% few-shot adaptation performance with only 5% of target user data. Our work has proposed the concept of EMG signals as a cross-device physiological language, learned their grammar from massive amounts of data, and laid the groundwork for a single-training, universally applicable EMG foundation model.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

EMG
generalization
data heterogeneity
label scarcity
representational framework
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

self-supervised representation learning
electromyography (EMG)
Neuromuscular Contraction Tokenizer
cross-device generalization
physiological language modeling
Z
Zhenghao Huang
South China University of Technology
H
Huilin Yao
South China University of Technology
K
Kaikai Wang
South China University of Technology
L
Lin Shu
South China University of Technology