DGSD: Dynamical graph self-distillation for EEG-based auditory spatial attention detection.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

Auditory Attention Detection (AAD) aims to detect the target speaker from brain signals in a multi-speaker environment. Although EEG-based AAD methods have shown promising results in recent years, current approaches primarily rely on traditional convolutional neural networks designed for processing Euclidean data like images. This makes it challenging to handle EEG signals, which possess non-Euclidean characteristics. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes a dynamical graph self-distillation (DGSD) approach for AAD, which does not require speech stimuli as input. Specifically, to effectively represent the non-Euclidean properties of EEG signals, dynamical graph convolutional networks are applied to represent the graph structure of EEG signals, which can also extract crucial features related to auditory spatial attention in EEG signals. In addition, to further improve AAD detection performance, self-distillation, consisting of feature distillation and hierarchical distillation strategies at each layer, is integrated. These strategies leverage features and classification results from the deepest network layers to guide the learning of shallow layers. Our experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets, KUL and DTU. Under a 1-second time window, we achieve results of 90.0% and 79.6% accuracy on KUL and DTU, respectively. We compare our DGSD method with competitive baselines, and the experimental results indicate that the detection performance of our proposed DGSD method is not only superior to the best reproducible baseline but also significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 100 times.

Authors

  • Cunhang Fan
    Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China. Electronic address: cunhang.fan@ahu.edu.cn.
  • Hongyu Zhang
    School of Nursing, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325035, China.
  • Wei Huang
    Shaanxi Institute of Flexible Electronics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 710072 Xi'an, China.
  • Jun Xue
    Department of Echocardiography, China Meitan General Hospital, Beijing, China.
  • Jianhua Tao
    School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, China. Electronic address: jhtao@nlpr.ia.ac.cn.
  • Jiangyan Yi
    National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China.
  • Zhao Lv
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China; Institute of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China. Electronic address: kjlz@ahu.edu.cn.
  • Xiaopei Wu
    Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China. Electronic address: wxp2001@ahu.edu.cn.