Towards Multi-Source Domain Generalization for Sleep Staging with Noisy Labels

arXiv cs.LG / 4/14/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper targets automatic sleep staging from multimodal signals (e.g., EEG/EOG) where performance is hindered by both cross-domain shifts and noisy labels.
  • It introduces the first benchmark, NL-DGSS, to evaluate noisy-label robustness in multi-source domain-generalized sleep staging and finds that existing noisy-label methods fail when domain shift and label noise occur together.
  • The proposed FF-TRUST framework uses domain-invariant multimodal learning with Joint Time-Frequency Early Learning Regularization (JTF-ELR) and confidence-diversity regularization to improve robustness under noisy supervision.
  • Experiments across five public datasets show consistent state-of-the-art results under both symmetric and asymmetric noise scenarios.
  • The authors plan to release the benchmark and code publicly via the provided GitHub repository.

Abstract

Automatic sleep staging is a multimodal learning problem involving heterogeneous physiological signals such as EEG and EOG, which often suffer from domain shifts across institutions, devices, and populations. In practice, these data are also affected by noisy annotations, yet label-noise-robust multi-source domain generalization remains underexplored. We present the first benchmark for Noisy Labels in Multi-Source Domain-Generalized Sleep Staging (NL-DGSS) and show that existing noisy-label learning methods degrade substantially when domain shifts and label noise coexist. To address this challenge, we propose FF-TRUST, a domain-invariant multimodal sleep staging framework with Joint Time-Frequency Early Learning Regularization (JTF-ELR). By jointly exploiting temporal and spectral consistency together with confidence-diversity regularization, FF-TRUST improves robustness under noisy supervision. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrate consistent state-of-the-art performance under diverse symmetric and asymmetric noise settings. The benchmark and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/KNWang970918/FF-TRUST.git.