CPEP: Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training Enhances Gesture Generalization on EMG Signals

This paper was accepted at the Foundation Models for the Brain and Body Workshop at NeurIPS 2025.

Hand gesture classification using high-quality structured data such as videos, images, and hand skeletons is a well-explored problem in computer vision. Leveraging low-power, cost-effective biosignals, e.g. surface electromyography (sEMG), allows for continuous gesture prediction on wearables. In this paper, we demonstrate that learning representations from weak-modality data that are aligned with those from structured, high-quality data can improve representation quality and enables zero-shot classification. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Pose-EMG Pre-training (CPEP) framework to align EMG and pose representations, where we learn an EMG encoder that produces high-quality and pose-informative representations. We assess the gesture classification performance of our model through linear probing and zero-shot setups. Our model outperforms emg2pose benchmark models by up to 21% on in-distribution gesture classification and 72% on unseen (out-of-distribution) gesture classification.

• † University of Southern California
• ** Work done while at Apple