EMBridge: Enhancing Gesture Generalization from EMG Signals Through Cross-modal Representation Learning

Wenhui Cui, Christopher M. Sandino, Hadi Pouransari, Ran Liu, Juri Minxha, Ellen Zippi, Erdrin Azemi, Behrooz Mahasseni

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Hand gesture classification using high-quality structured data such as videos, images, and hand skeletons is a well-explored problem in computer vision. Alternatively, leveraging low-power, cost-effective bio-signals, e.g. surface electromyography (sEMG), allows for continuous gesture prediction on wearable devices. In this work, we aim to enhance EMG representation quality by aligning it with embeddings obtained from structured, high-quality modalities that provide richer semantic guidance, ultimately enabling zero-shot gesture generalization. Specifically, we propose EMBridge, a cross-modal representation learning framework that bridges the modality gap between EMG and pose. EMBridge learns high-quality EMG representations by introducing a Querying Transformer (Q-Former), a masked pose reconstruction loss, and a community-aware soft contrastive learning objective that aligns the relative geometry of the embedding spaces. We evaluate EMBridge on both in-distribution and unseen gesture classification tasks and demonstrate consistent performance gains over all baselines. To the best of our knowledge, EMBridge is the first cross-modal representation learning framework to achieve zero-shot gesture classification from wearable EMG signals, showing potential toward real-world gesture recognition on wearable devices.