BiGSTF-Net: Inter-Modal Mutual Guidance and Intra-Modal Spatio-Temporal Fusion for EEG-fNIRS Cognitive Classification
The study proposes BiGSTF-Net, a multimodal architecture that exploits the complementary properties of EEG and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for cognitive-state decoding: heterogeneous spatio-temporal extractors capture each modality's representations, a modal residual interaction unit provides bidirectional cross-modal guidance, and a spatio-temporal gating unit fuses intra-modal features. Under cross-session evaluation on multiple BCI datasets, BiGSTF-Net consistently outperformed representative multimodal fusion baselines; ablations validated each component and visualizations matched the known neurophysiological features of the two signals.