# Trans-cVAE-GAN: Transformer-Based cVAE-GAN for High-Fidelity EEG Signal Generation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new AI model called Trans-cVAE-GAN that generates realistic EEG signals, improving accuracy and control for applications like emotion recognition and brain-computer interfaces.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a Transformer-based cVAE-GAN that enhances EEG signal generation with fidelity, stability, and semantic controllability.

## Key findings

- Trans-cVAE-GAN achieves high similarity to real EEG signals with Pearson/Spearman correlations above 0.82 and low spectral divergence.
- Generated EEG data improves emotion recognition accuracy from 86.9% to 91.8% on the SEED dataset.
- The model outperforms classical GAN baselines and demonstrates robustness across multiple datasets.

## Abstract

Electroencephalography signal generation remains a challenging task due to its non-stationarity, multi-scale oscillations, and strong spatiotemporal coupling. Conventional generative models, including VAEs and GAN variants such as DCGAN, WGAN, and WGAN-GP, often yield blurred waveforms, unstable spectral distributions, or lack semantic controllability, limiting their effectiveness in emotion-related applications. To address these challenges, this research proposes a Transformer-based conditional variational autoencoder–generative adversarial network (Trans-cVAE-GAN) that combines Transformer-driven temporal modeling, label-conditioned latent inference, and adversarial learning. A multi-dimensional structural loss further constrains generation by preserving temporal correlation, frequency-domain consistency, and statistical distribution. Experiments on three SEED-family datasets—SEED, SEED-FRA, and SEED-GER—demonstrate high similarity to real EEG, with representative mean ± SD correlations of Pearson ≈ 0.84 ± 0.08/0.74 ± 0.12/0.84 ± 0.07 and Spearman ≈ 0.82 ± 0.07/0.72 ± 0.12/0.83 ± 0.08, together with low spectral divergence (KL ≈ 0.39 ± 0.15/0.41 ± 0.20/0.37 ± 0.18). Comparative analyses show consistent gains over classical GAN baselines, while ablations verify the indispensable roles of the Transformer encoder, label conditioning, and cVAE module. In downstream emotion recognition, augmentation with generated EEG raises accuracy from 86.9% to 91.8% on SEED (with analogous gains on SEED-FRA and SEED-GER), underscoring enhanced generalization and robustness. These results confirm that the proposed approach simultaneously ensures fidelity, stability, and controllability across cohorts, offering a scalable solution for affective computing and brain–computer interface applications.