Prototype-Guided Non-Exemplar Continual Learning for Cross-subject EEG Decoding

Due to the significant variability in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals across individuals, knowledge acquired from previous subjects is often overwritten as new subjects are introduced in continual EEG decoding tasks. Existing methods mainly rely on storing historical data from seen subjects as replay buffers to mitigate forgetting, which is impractical under privacy or memory constraints. To address this issue, we propose a Prototype-guided Non-Exemplar Continual Learning (ProNECL) framework that preserves prior knowledge without accessing historical EEG samples. ProNECL summarizes subject-specific discriminative representations into class-level prototypes and incrementally aligns new subject representations with a global prototype memory through prototype-based feature regularization and cross-subject alignment. Experiments on the BCI Competition IV 2a and 2b datasets demonstrate that ProNECL effectively balances knowledge retention and adaptability, achieving superior performance in cross-subject continual EEG decoding tasks.