MAESTRO: a Multimodal Auditory-attention Egocentric Speech-TRacking Open corpus

K M Naimul Hassan, Ali Alavi, Donald S. Williamson

Humans rely on gaze, head movements, and visual cues to attend to speakers in noisy environments, yet auditory attention decoding (AAD) has been studied primarily using electroencephalography (EEG). We introduce the Multimodal Auditory-attention Egocentric Speech-TRacking Open (MAESTRO) corpus, the first AAD dataset to simultaneously record EEG, eye gaze, pupillometry, egocentric video, and head inertial measurement unit (IMU) data. MAESTRO includes four competing speakers and background noise across multiple signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, enabling attention decoding under realistic listening scenarios. Through a four-speaker attention decoding benchmark, we show that combining behavioral and physiological signals improves decoding performance over EEG-only approaches, enabling future advances in multimodal auditory attention decoding. These findings open the door to new applications, analyses, and methodological advances in multimodal AAD. The complete dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aspire-osu/maestro-eeg-dataset . The official code repository is available at https://github.com/ASPIRE-OSU/MAESTRO .