CA-TCN: A Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network for Direct Auditory Attention Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: García-Ugarte, Iñigo, Eguinoa, Rubén, Martín, Ricardo San, Paternain, Daniel, Vidaurre, Carmen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author García-Ugarte, Iñigo
Eguinoa, Rubén
Martín, Ricardo San
Paternain, Daniel
Vidaurre, Carmen
author_facet García-Ugarte, Iñigo
Eguinoa, Rubén
Martín, Ricardo San
Paternain, Daniel
Vidaurre, Carmen
contents A promising approach for steering auditory attention in complex listening environments relies on Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD), which aim to identify the attended speech stream in a multiple speaker scenario from neural recordings. Entrainment-based AAD approaches, typically assume access to clean speech sources and electroencephalography (EEG) signals to exploit low-frequency correlations between the neural response and the attended stimulus. In this study, we propose CA-TCN, a Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network that directly classifies the attended speaker. The proposed architecture integrates several best practices from convolutional neural networks in sequence processing tasks. Importantly, it explicitly aligns auditory stimuli and neural responses by employing separate causal and anticausal convolutions respectively, with distinct receptive fields operating in opposite temporal directions. Experimental results, obtained through comparisons with three baseline AAD models, demonstrated that CA-TCN consistently improved decoding accuracy across datasets and decision windows, with gains ranging from 0.5% to 3.2% for subject-independent models and from 0.8% to 2.9% for subject-specific models compared with the next best-performing model, AADNet. Moreover, these improvements were statistically significant in four of the six evaluated settings when comparing Minimum Expected Switch Duration distributions. Beyond accuracy, the model demonstrated spatial robustness across different conditions, as the EEG spatial filters exhibited stable patterns across datasets. Overall, this work introduces an accurate and unified AAD model that outperforms existing methods while considering practical benefits for online processing scenarios. These findings contribute to advancing the state of AAD and its applicability in real-world systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26394
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CA-TCN: A Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network for Direct Auditory Attention Decoding
García-Ugarte, Iñigo
Eguinoa, Rubén
Martín, Ricardo San
Paternain, Daniel
Vidaurre, Carmen
Sound
A promising approach for steering auditory attention in complex listening environments relies on Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD), which aim to identify the attended speech stream in a multiple speaker scenario from neural recordings. Entrainment-based AAD approaches, typically assume access to clean speech sources and electroencephalography (EEG) signals to exploit low-frequency correlations between the neural response and the attended stimulus. In this study, we propose CA-TCN, a Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network that directly classifies the attended speaker. The proposed architecture integrates several best practices from convolutional neural networks in sequence processing tasks. Importantly, it explicitly aligns auditory stimuli and neural responses by employing separate causal and anticausal convolutions respectively, with distinct receptive fields operating in opposite temporal directions. Experimental results, obtained through comparisons with three baseline AAD models, demonstrated that CA-TCN consistently improved decoding accuracy across datasets and decision windows, with gains ranging from 0.5% to 3.2% for subject-independent models and from 0.8% to 2.9% for subject-specific models compared with the next best-performing model, AADNet. Moreover, these improvements were statistically significant in four of the six evaluated settings when comparing Minimum Expected Switch Duration distributions. Beyond accuracy, the model demonstrated spatial robustness across different conditions, as the EEG spatial filters exhibited stable patterns across datasets. Overall, this work introduces an accurate and unified AAD model that outperforms existing methods while considering practical benefits for online processing scenarios. These findings contribute to advancing the state of AAD and its applicability in real-world systems.
title CA-TCN: A Causal-Anticausal Temporal Convolutional Network for Direct Auditory Attention Decoding
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26394