NeuroCodec: EEG-Guided Latent-Domain Generative Model for High-Fidelity Target Speaker Extraction

Julian Silva, Jaliya Kodithuwakku, Navindu Sirimanna, Shaveen Herath, Wageesha N. Manamperi +1

Driven by recent advancements in hearing assistive devices, target speaker extraction (TSE) in multi-talker environments has drawn significant attention. To address this, hearing technologies identify attention using neural signals recorded via electroencephalography (EEG) to guide TSE, enabling neuro-steered auditory attention decoding. However, most existing techniques rely on time-frequency masking, which suffers from low fidelity in spectro-temporally overlapping regions and is often restricted to narrowband audio. In contrast, we introduce NeuroCodec, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first generative EEG-guided TSE framework operating in the latent space of a neural audio codec. Specifically, NeuroCodec models spatial EEG dependencies via graph convolutions and fuses cross-modal EEG and speech representations through attention mechanisms and Mamba-based temporal modeling. We further introduce a six-phase training curriculum that progressively incorporates latent reconstruction, multi-scale spectral, and adversarial objectives to ensure stable, high-fidelity speech generation. Experiments on the public Cocktail Party and KUL datasets show NeuroCodec outperforms…