Unified Temporal–Spectral–Spatial Modeling for Robust and Generalizable Motor Imagery Brain–Computer Interfaces

Motor imagery (MI)-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have led to great interest as a result of their potential use in neurorehabilitation, assistive robotics, and human–computer interaction. However, decoding electroencephalographic (EEG) signals with high accuracy continues to be a difficult task due to the weak signal-to-noise ratio, differences among subjects, and the complicated temporal–spectral–spatial neural dynamics. Deep learning methods recently developed, such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent architectures, graph neural networks, and adversarial transfer learning, have enhanced MI decoding performance, yet many models are still concentrating on a single representation domain or they need costly adaptation phases in terms of computation. To tackle these shortcomings, we present NeuroCrossNet, a unified tri-modal deep learning model that is able to learn the temporal, spectral, and spatial EEG features jointly for robust and calibration-free MI decoding. The suggested network combines a Temporal HyperMixer Block for capturing long-range temporal dependencies, a wavelet transformer for learning localized time–frequency representation, and a Graph Attention Network for EEG topology-aware spatial reasoning. Additionally, a Dynamic Residual Attention Gate (DRAG) has been developed to adaptively merge heterogeneous feature streams, and a compact subject-aware normalization (SAN) method enhances cross-subject generalization without the use of labeled target-domain calibration data. Our proposed model was tested following the rigorous leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) approach on BCI Competition IV-2a and High-Gamma datasets. NeuroCrossNet reached a classification accuracy of 91.30%, surpassing several strong benchmark methods, including CNN-LSTM, EEGNet, DeepConvNet, spectral CNN, and graph-based EEG decoding frameworks. Furthermore, a large number of ablation studies reveal that the integration of temporally, spectrally, and spatially complementary representations considerably boosts robustness and inter-subject consistency.