Memory-Augmented Online Test-Time Adaptation for EEG Motor Imagery via Perturbation Consistency and Confidence Calibration

Abstract

Recently, electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have gained traction as portable neural measurement systems. However, the practical deployment of these instruments is often hindered by nonstationarity and cross-subject distribution shifts, which lead to significant intersubject inconsistency. Existing adaptation methods remain impractical for real-time measurement scenarios, as they typically require offline access to source or aggregated target data. To address these challenges, this article proposes memory-augmented online test-time adaptation (OTTA) with perturbation consistency and confidence calibration (MOPC), a source-free framework designed to enhance the reliability of BCI instrumentation. MOPC enables the measurement system to update its decoding parameters on the fly during the inference stage, facilitating single-pass adaptation without accessing sensitive source data. We introduce random-mask perturbations to enforce prediction consistency against inherent EEG signal noise and acquisition artifacts. Furthermore, a confidence-calibrated reweighting loss is designed to integrate feature-space similarity, effectively mitigating unreliable pseudolabels and class imbalance during continuous signal acquisition. To ensure system stability and prevent the catastrophic forgetting of established neural patterns, a lightweight memory module is incorporated to regularize parameter updates within a tight latency budget. Evaluated on the BCI IV IIb and OpenBMI datasets, MOPC achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming prior methods by 2.22 % and 3.67 %, respectively, while keeping the per-trial adaptation latency to approximately 40–60 ms. This study provides a robust, recalibration-free solution for real-time EEG decoding, marking a significant advancement in the precision and usability of practical BCI measurement instruments. The source code is available at https://github.com/KunKun-Zhang/MOPC.git