AERIAL: Adversarial Evaluation of Robustness in Accuracy-Preserving Low-Precision EEG Decoders

Deployment-oriented compression is attractive for resource-constrained brain--computer interfaces (BCIs), but whether it changes adversarial vulnerability remains unclear. On BCI Competition IV-2a, we compare 32-bit floating-point (FP32) EEGNet and ShallowConvNet models with global magnitude pruning and simulated INT8 post training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) across nine subjects and three seeds. Simulation provides differentiable quantize--dequantize models for white-box attacks and gradient analysis, while native TensorRT deployment is used for validation. Accuracy-preserving compression does not improve direct robustness: at ε=0.005, EEGNet PGD accuracy remains 22--24% across FP32, 50% pruning (P50), PTQ, and QAT. However, P50 reduces bidirectional transfer efficiency to 0.963/0.928 (FP32\rightarrowP50/P50\rightarrowFP32), versus 0.994/0.997 for PTQ; the same trend holds for ShallowConvNet. Gradient alignment shows a corresponding separation, while native PTQ agrees with simulated clean/adversarial predictions in 95--98% of cases. These results show that direct robustness, adversarial transfer, and deployment efficiency are distinct properties of compressed EEG decoders.