wearable sensor developers

Abstract: Prosthetic and assistive interfaces increasingly depend on decoding hand gestures from surface electromyography (sEMG). Because the signal is shaped by person-specific factors, the recurrent neural networks (RNNs) commonly used to model these temporal streams must adapt to new wearers and new gesture classes after deployment. Continual learning (CL) enables this adaptation without retraining from scratch, yet applying it to recurrent sEMG models is not straightforward. Standard recurrent training practices can destabilize learning, and which CL strategy holds up under realistic cross-user drift is unestablished. We evaluate three representative CL strategies under domain- and class-incremental drift on NinaPro DB1, and find experience replay to outperform elastic weight consolidation (EWC) and naive fine-tuning. It reaches 83.3% final accuracy for class-incremental drift while limiting forgetting to 1.8-5.8% accuracy drop, as against 16.2-28.5% for EWC and naive training. We further show these models must be trained on shuffled, independently-windowed segments. Streaming windows in temporal order collapses the network into predicting a single dominant gesture, while a shuffled, stateless regime trains stably. Finally, hand-crafted time-domain features raise per-task accuracy by up to about 40% over raw signals, but only replay preserves that gain under class-incremental drift.

Abstract: Exploiting meaningful latent structures from data to solve downstream tasks is a fundamental challenge in signal processing and machine learning. While Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and coVariance Neural Networks (VNNs) successfully leverage the covariance matrix to process data, they inherently capture both direct and indirect correlations. The precision matrix (inverse covariance) overcomes this by explicitly encoding conditional independencies, making it largely studied in graphical lasso and graph topology identification. However, finite-sample precision estimates are notoriously unstable, and regularized estimators remain task-agnostic. In this work, our principal contribution is tackling the challenging problem of task-aware graph inference. We propose Precision Neural Networks-Joint (PNN-Joint), a framework that jointly estimates a sparse, statistically grounded precision matrix alongside graph neural network weights via an alternating optimization scheme. As a foundational framework to support this, we introduce Precision Neural Networks (PNNs), a broader class of graph convolutional networks operating on precision estimators, and establish their spectral connections to PCA and VNNs alongside their stability to finite-sample errors. Extensive empirical evaluations on synthetic data, as well as real-world neuroimaging and motion sensor datasets, demonstrate that PNN-Joint yields highly interpretable task-aware graphs, exhibits remarkable robustness in low-data regimes, and consistently achieves the best or second-best performance among competitors on real-world tasks.