PPG-Based Affect Recognition with Long-Range Deep Models: A Measurement-Driven Comparison of CNN, Transformer, and Mamba Architectures

TL;DR

This study compares CNN, Transformer, and Mamba deep learning models for PPG-based affect recognition, finding CNNs most effective overall, with Transformers offering a better balance of F1 scores.

Contribution

First comprehensive evaluation of Transformer and Mamba architectures for PPG affect recognition, providing practical insights for wearable affective computing.

Findings

Transformers and Mamba achieve comparable performance to CNNs.

CNNs provide the highest accuracy and smallest size.

Transformers balance F1 scores for Arousal and Relaxation.

Abstract

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly used in wearable affective computing due to its low cost and ease of integration into consumer devices. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced long-range sequence models, such as Transformers, and state-space models, like Mamba, which have demonstrated strong performance on natural language and general time-series tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these architectures offer tangible benefits over widely used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) for PPG-based affect recognition, given that datasets are typically small and noisy. This work presents a measurement-driven comparison of four deep learning architectures, CNN, CNN-LSTM hybrid, Transformers, and Mamba, for classifying arousal, valence, and relaxation states from wrist-based PPG signals. All models are evaluated under a subject-independent 5-fold cross-validation protocol using identical preprocessing, segmentation, and training pipelines. Our results show that the Transformer and Mamba models achieve performance comparable to that of a CNN baseline, but do not consistently outperform it across all tasks. CNNs remain the most effective overall, providing the highest accuracy with the smallest model size, whereas Transformers have a better balance of F1 scores for Arousal and Relaxation. The study provides the first evaluation of Transformer and Mamba models for PPG-based affect recognition, offering practical guidance on model selection for wearable affective monitoring systems.