CaT-SleepNet: A Cross-Attention and Transformer-Based Hybrid Framework for EEG–EOG Sleep Stage Classification

Authors

  • Jin Peng School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Haodong Fang School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Yuanyuan Sheng School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Wensheng Liu School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Yuyue Wu School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Ruiheng Xie School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China
  • Li Zhu School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24297/ijct.v25i.9815

Keywords:

Sleep staging, EEG, Transformer, Cross-attention, Multimodal fusion, XGBoost

Abstract

sleep disorders and understanding sleep mechanisms. However, traditional deep learning models often fail to effectively
capture both temporal dependencies within Electroencephalogram(EEG) signals and the semantic correlations between
multimodal inputs. In this study, we propose a dual-stream Transformer-based framework that integrates raw EEG and
electro-oculogram (EOG) signals and their corresponding time-frequency (TF) representations through a cross-attention
fusion mechanism. Each modality is first processed by independent feature extractors, followed by pre-trained channellevel Transformers to capture intra-channel temporal dependencies. Finally, a global Transformer module is used for feature extraction, and the learned representations are classified using an optimized XGBoost classifier to enhance
discrimination ability. Experimental results on the Sleep-EDF-20, Sleep-EDF-78, and ISRUC-S3 datasets show that
the proposed model achieves accuracies of 88.5%, 86.8%, and 84.0%, respectively, outperforming several state-of-the-art
baselines and confirming the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal fusion and hybrid Transformer-XGBoost design
for sleep stage classification.

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Published

2025-11-27

How to Cite

Peng, J., Fang, H., Sheng, Y., Liu, W., Wu, Y., Xie, R., & Zhu, L. (2025). CaT-SleepNet: A Cross-Attention and Transformer-Based Hybrid Framework for EEG–EOG Sleep Stage Classification. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTERS &Amp; TECHNOLOGY, 25, 100–113. https://doi.org/10.24297/ijct.v25i.9815

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Research Articles