Auditory Attention Decoding without Spatial Information: A Diotic EEG Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yoshino, Masahiro, Yokota, Haruki, Hara, Junya, Tanaka, Yuichi, Higashi, Hiroshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yoshino, Masahiro
Yokota, Haruki
Hara, Junya
Tanaka, Yuichi
Higashi, Hiroshi
author_facet Yoshino, Masahiro
Yokota, Haruki
Hara, Junya
Tanaka, Yuichi
Higashi, Hiroshi
contents Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the attended speech stream in multi-speaker environments by decoding brain signals such as electroencephalography (EEG). This technology is essential for realizing smart hearing aids that address the cocktail party problem and for facilitating objective audiometry systems. Existing AAD research mainly utilizes dichotic environments where different speech signals are presented to the left and right ears, enabling models to classify directional attention rather than speech content. However, this spatial reliance limits applicability to real-world scenarios, such as the "cocktail party" situation, where speakers overlap or move dynamically. To address this challenge, we propose an AAD framework for diotic environments where identical speech mixtures are presented to both ears, eliminating spatial cues. Our approach maps EEG and speech signals into a shared latent space using independent encoders. We extract speech features using wav2vec 2.0 and encode them with a 2-layer 1D convolutional neural network (CNN), while employing the BrainNetwork architecture for EEG encoding. The model identifies the attended speech by calculating the cosine similarity between EEG and speech representations. We evaluate our method on a diotic EEG dataset and achieve 72.70% accuracy, which is 22.58% higher than the state-of-the-art direction-based AAD method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_16442
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Auditory Attention Decoding without Spatial Information: A Diotic EEG Study
Yoshino, Masahiro
Yokota, Haruki
Hara, Junya
Tanaka, Yuichi
Higashi, Hiroshi
Signal Processing
Human-Computer Interaction
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the attended speech stream in multi-speaker environments by decoding brain signals such as electroencephalography (EEG). This technology is essential for realizing smart hearing aids that address the cocktail party problem and for facilitating objective audiometry systems. Existing AAD research mainly utilizes dichotic environments where different speech signals are presented to the left and right ears, enabling models to classify directional attention rather than speech content. However, this spatial reliance limits applicability to real-world scenarios, such as the "cocktail party" situation, where speakers overlap or move dynamically. To address this challenge, we propose an AAD framework for diotic environments where identical speech mixtures are presented to both ears, eliminating spatial cues. Our approach maps EEG and speech signals into a shared latent space using independent encoders. We extract speech features using wav2vec 2.0 and encode them with a 2-layer 1D convolutional neural network (CNN), while employing the BrainNetwork architecture for EEG encoding. The model identifies the attended speech by calculating the cosine similarity between EEG and speech representations. We evaluate our method on a diotic EEG dataset and achieve 72.70% accuracy, which is 22.58% higher than the state-of-the-art direction-based AAD method.
title Auditory Attention Decoding without Spatial Information: A Diotic EEG Study
topic Signal Processing
Human-Computer Interaction
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16442