Fast BCIs: Leveraging Dual-Scale Time Windows with Test-Time Adaptation to Enhance Accuracy

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) must deliver outputs rapidly in numerous practical applications. However, the decoding accuracy may decline significantly when the time window (TW) is too short, a challenge exacerbated by the increasing adoption of deep learning methods in BCIs. For fast yet accurate outputs, this paper introduces a dual-scale time window (DTW) strategy with test-time adaptation (TTA), wherein the short TW decoding benefits from long TW setting through the TTA mechanism. Specifically, this strategy employs two specialized networks trained on EEG data with a short TW and a long TW respectively: the Main Network (MainNet), optimized for fast recognition within the short TW, and the Auxiliary Network (AuxNet), which generates high-confidence pseudo-labels with the long TW to update the MainNet during testing. The AuxNet's assistance leads to more accurate outputs from the MainNet in the short TW. We evaluated the method across diverse paradigms, including motor imagery (MI), steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP), and event-related potential (ERP) tasks, covering both high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. At a 0.5 s TW, DTW-TTA achieved 74.64 % accuracy and 29.69 bits/min ITR on BCI-IV 2b (MI), 80.15 % and 128.16 bits/min on GIGA (SSVEP) dataset, 91.86 % and 229.82 bits/min on Benchmark (SSVEP) dataset, and 92.13 % and 74.04 bits/min on a VR-ERP dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in all cases. These results demonstrate that DTW-TTA effectively stabilizes short TW decoding and can be seamlessly integrated into deep learning-based BCI systems across paradigms.