SPECTRE: Spectral Pre-training Embeddings with Cylindrical Temporal Rotary Position Encoding for Fine-Grained sEMG-Based Movement Decoding

Abstract: Decoding fine-grained movement from non-invasive surface Electromyography (sEMG) is a challenge for prosthetic control due to signal non-stationarity and low signal-to-noise ratios. Generic self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks often yield suboptimal results on sEMG as they attempt to reconstruct noisy raw signals and lack the inductive bias to model the cylindrical topology of electrode arrays. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SPECTRE, a domain-specific SSL framework. SPECTRE features two primary contributions: a physiologically-grounded pre-training task and a novel positional encoding. The pre-training involves masked prediction of discrete pseudo-labels from clustered Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) representations, compelling the model to learn robust, physiologically relevant frequency patterns. Additionally, our Cylindrical Rotary Position Embedding (CyRoPE) factorizes embeddings along linear temporal and annular spatial dimensions, explicitly modeling the forearm sensor topology to capture muscle synergies. Evaluations on multiple datasets, including challenging data from individuals with amputation, demonstrate that SPECTRE establishes a new state-of-the-art for movement decoding, significantly outperforming both supervised baselines and generic SSL approaches. Ablation studies validate the critical roles of both spectral pre-training and CyRoPE. SPECTRE provides a robust foundation for practical myoelectric interfaces capable of handling real-world sEMG complexities.