Unlocking Non-Invasive Brain-to-Text

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jayalath, Dulhan, Landau, Gilad, Jones, Oiwi Parker
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jayalath, Dulhan
Landau, Gilad
Jones, Oiwi Parker
author_facet Jayalath, Dulhan
Landau, Gilad
Jones, Oiwi Parker
contents Despite major advances in surgical brain-to-text (B2T), i.e. transcribing speech from invasive brain recordings, non-invasive alternatives have yet to surpass even chance on standard metrics. This remains a barrier to building a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) capable of restoring communication in paralysed individuals without surgery. Here, we present the first non-invasive B2T result that significantly exceeds these critical baselines, raising BLEU by $1.4\mathrm{-}2.6\times$ over prior work. This result is driven by three contributions: (1) we extend recent word-classification models with LLM-based rescoring, transforming single-word predictors into closed-vocabulary B2T systems; (2) we introduce a predictive in-filling approach to handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, substantially expanding the effective vocabulary; and (3) we demonstrate, for the first time, how to scale non-invasive B2T models across datasets, unlocking deep learning at scale and improving accuracy by $2.1\mathrm{-}2.3\times$. Through these contributions, we offer new insights into the roles of data quality and vocabulary size. Together, our results remove a major obstacle to realising practical non-invasive B2T systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13446
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking Non-Invasive Brain-to-Text
Jayalath, Dulhan
Landau, Gilad
Jones, Oiwi Parker
Machine Learning
Despite major advances in surgical brain-to-text (B2T), i.e. transcribing speech from invasive brain recordings, non-invasive alternatives have yet to surpass even chance on standard metrics. This remains a barrier to building a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) capable of restoring communication in paralysed individuals without surgery. Here, we present the first non-invasive B2T result that significantly exceeds these critical baselines, raising BLEU by $1.4\mathrm{-}2.6\times$ over prior work. This result is driven by three contributions: (1) we extend recent word-classification models with LLM-based rescoring, transforming single-word predictors into closed-vocabulary B2T systems; (2) we introduce a predictive in-filling approach to handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, substantially expanding the effective vocabulary; and (3) we demonstrate, for the first time, how to scale non-invasive B2T models across datasets, unlocking deep learning at scale and improving accuracy by $2.1\mathrm{-}2.3\times$. Through these contributions, we offer new insights into the roles of data quality and vocabulary size. Together, our results remove a major obstacle to realising practical non-invasive B2T systems.
title Unlocking Non-Invasive Brain-to-Text
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13446