AAD-LLM: Neural Attention-Driven Auditory Scene Understanding

Xilin Jiang, Sukru Samet Dindar, Vishal Choudhari, Stephan Bickel, Ashesh Mehta, Guy M McKhann, Adeen Flinker, Daniel Friedman, Nima Mesgarani

AAD-LLM: Neural Attention-Driven Auditory Scene Understanding: 5 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #16 of 22 papers on 2025-02-26. Day-by-day upvote history.

Auditory foundation models, including auditory large language models (LLMs), process all sound inputs equally, independent of listener perception. However, human auditory perception is inherently selective: listeners focus on specific speakers while ignoring others in complex auditory scenes. Existing models do not incorporate this selectivity, limiting their ability to generate perception-aligned responses. To address this, we introduce Intention-Informed Auditory Scene Understanding (II-ASU) and present Auditory Attention-Driven LLM (AAD-LLM), a prototype system that integrates brain signals to infer listener attention. AAD-LLM extends an auditory LLM by incorporating intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings to decode which speaker a listener is attending to and refine responses accordingly. The model first predicts the attended speaker from neural activity, then conditions response generation on this inferred attentional state. We evaluate AAD-LLM on speaker description, speech transcription and extraction, and question answering in multitalker scenarios, with both objective and subjective ratings showing improved alignment with listener intention. By taking a first step toward intention-aware auditory AI, this work explores a new paradigm where listener perception informs machine listening, paving the way for future listener-centered auditory systems. Demo and code available: https://aad-llm.github.io.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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