Leveraging Convolutional Sparse Autoencoders for Robust Movement Classification from Low-Density sEMG

Reliable control of myoelectric prostheses is often hindered by high inter-subject variability and the clinical impracticality of high-density sensor arrays. This study proposes a deep learning framework for accurate gesture recognition using only two surface electromyography (sEMG) channels. The method employs a Convolutional Sparse Autoencoder (CSAE) to extract temporal feature representations directly from raw signals, eliminating the need for heuristic feature engineering. On a 6-class gesture set, our model achieved a multi-subject F1-score of 94.3% $\pm$ 0.3%. To address subject-specific differences, we present a few-shot transfer learning protocol that improved performance on unseen subjects from a baseline of 35.1% $\pm$ 3.1% to 92.3% $\pm$ 0.9% with minimal calibration data. Furthermore, the system supports functional extensibility through an incremental learning strategy, allowing for expansion to a 10-class set with a 90.0% $\pm$ 0.2% F1-score without full model retraining. By combining high precision with minimal computational and sensor overhead, this framework provides a scalable and efficient approach for the next generation of affordable and adaptive prosthetic systems.

Gradient Descent Methods for Regularized Optimization

Regularization is a widely recognized technique in mathematical optimization. It can be used to smooth out objective functions, refine the feasible solution set, or prevent overfitting in machine learning models. Due to its simplicity and robustness, the gradient descent (GD) method is one of the primary methods used for numerical optimization of differentiable objective functions. However, GD is not well-suited for solving $\ell^1$ regularized optimization problems since these problems are non-differentiable at zero, causing iteration updates to oscillate or fail to converge. Instead, a more effective version of GD, called the proximal gradient descent employs a technique known as soft-thresholding to shrink the iteration updates toward zero, thus enabling sparsity in the solution. Motivated by the widespread applications of proximal GD in sparse and low-rank recovery across various engineering disciplines, we provide an overview of the GD and proximal GD methods for solving regularized optimization problems. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for the proximal GD method that incorporates a variable step size. Unlike conventional proximal GD, which uses a fixed step size based on the global Lipschitz constant, our method estimates the Lipschitz constant locally at each iteration and uses its reciprocal as the step size. This eliminates the need for a global Lipschitz constant, which can be impractical to compute. Numerical experiments we performed on synthetic and real-data sets show notable performance improvement of the proposed method compared to the conventional proximal GD with constant step size, both in terms of number of iterations and in time requirements.