Teaching PPG How not Who: Fixed-Effects Distillation from ECG
ECG is widely used to teach PPG-only models, yet what it teaches is unexamined. Wearables are valued for tracking how a person's cardiovascular state changes, but ECG-to-PPG distillation mostly learns who the person is. A per-recording mean, the trait, holds 40-59% of a frozen ECG teacher's target, and pooled students memorise it without carrying it to new recordings. The raw alignment cosine misses this, since a constant predictor scores 0.793. Across 34 runs, the more identity a student memorises, the less state it learns. Fixed-effects distillation subtracts each recording's mean from prediction and target, so the trait cancels exactly, while a pooled anchor keeps it. State agreement m...
| Authors | Zhongli Wu, Zhuangzhi Gao, Yuankai Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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