HyBRA-EEG: Hyperbolic Global-Local Brain-Region Aggregation for Self-Supervised EEG Representation Learning

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) representation learning is challenged by noisy signals, inter-subject variability, and heterogeneous electrode montages in different datasets and recording settings. Recent self-supervised EEG pretraining methods improve transferability by converting heterogeneous recordings into unified token or sequence representations, but channel-aware designs may still encode montage- or dataset-specific regularities. We propose HyBRA, a self-supervised framework based on hyperbolic global-local brain-region aggregation. HyBRA maps heterogeneous channel observations into a fixed regional token space by combining electrode coordinates, region priors, and feature-dependent hyperbolic distances. A channel-evidence injection branch preserves fine-grained discriminative cues during aggregation. The resulting tokens are processed by a Region-Time Transformer and pretrained with masked reconstruction of latent features and region-level signals. HyBRA outperforms the compared methods in average balanced accuracy on six benchmark datasets. Under a controlled six-fold evaluation on OpenBMI-MI, HyBRA matches CSBrain in balanced accuracy, improves AUROC by 1.84 percentage points and AUPRC by 5.23 percentage points, and uses 96.8\% fewer parameters. Matched comparisons on TUAB and TUEV show higher balanced accuracy for hyperbolic matching than for Euclidean distance or cosine similarity.