RL-BioAug: Label-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Self-Supervised EEG Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lee, Cheol-Hui, Lee, Hwa-Yeon, Kim, Dong-Joo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909996397101056
author Lee, Cheol-Hui
Lee, Hwa-Yeon
Kim, Dong-Joo
author_facet Lee, Cheol-Hui
Lee, Hwa-Yeon
Kim, Dong-Joo
contents The quality of data augmentation serves as a critical determinant for the performance of contrastive learning in EEG tasks. Although this paradigm is promising for utilizing unlabeled data, static or random augmentation strategies often fail to preserve intrinsic information due to the non-stationarity of EEG signals where statistical properties change over time. To address this, we propose RL-BioAug, a framework that leverages a label-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) agent to autonomously determine optimal augmentation policies. While utilizing only a minimal fraction (10%) of labeled data to guide the agent's policy, our method enables the encoder to learn robust representations in a strictly self-supervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that RL-BioAug significantly outperforms the random selection strategy, achieving substantial improvements of 9.69% and 8.80% in Macro-F1 score on the Sleep-EDFX and CHB-MIT datasets, respectively. Notably, this agent mainly chose optimal strategies for each task--for example, Time Masking with a 62% probability for sleep stage classification and Crop & Resize with a 77% probability for seizure detection. Our framework suggests its potential to replace conventional heuristic-based augmentations and establish a new autonomous paradigm for data augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/dlcjfgmlnasa/RL-BioAug.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_13964
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RL-BioAug: Label-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Self-Supervised EEG Representation Learning
Lee, Cheol-Hui
Lee, Hwa-Yeon
Kim, Dong-Joo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The quality of data augmentation serves as a critical determinant for the performance of contrastive learning in EEG tasks. Although this paradigm is promising for utilizing unlabeled data, static or random augmentation strategies often fail to preserve intrinsic information due to the non-stationarity of EEG signals where statistical properties change over time. To address this, we propose RL-BioAug, a framework that leverages a label-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) agent to autonomously determine optimal augmentation policies. While utilizing only a minimal fraction (10%) of labeled data to guide the agent's policy, our method enables the encoder to learn robust representations in a strictly self-supervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that RL-BioAug significantly outperforms the random selection strategy, achieving substantial improvements of 9.69% and 8.80% in Macro-F1 score on the Sleep-EDFX and CHB-MIT datasets, respectively. Notably, this agent mainly chose optimal strategies for each task--for example, Time Masking with a 62% probability for sleep stage classification and Crop & Resize with a 77% probability for seizure detection. Our framework suggests its potential to replace conventional heuristic-based augmentations and establish a new autonomous paradigm for data augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/dlcjfgmlnasa/RL-BioAug.
title RL-BioAug: Label-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Self-Supervised EEG Representation Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13964