Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation

Latest papers

• "What's That Sound?": A Versatile, Robust, and Lightweight Convolutional Transformer for Environment Sound Recognition

  Julia Huang · 24 September 2026

  The conventional hearing aid is both costly and lim- ited in usage, as it is not intended to detect non-speech audio. Our objective is to develop a machine learning solution to provide a more accurate and affordable mechanism to identify surrounding sounds to improve the safety of the hearing impair…

• ASR-Roundtrip Evaluation Can Mask Context- and Convention-Dependent Reading Errors in Chinese News TTS

  Shijun Luo, Lizhi Wan · 12 August 2026

  ASR-roundtrip evaluation is widely used as a scalable proxy for text-to-speech (TTS) intelligibility, but it can produce false negatives for reading errors perceived by listeners. We study Chinese news TTS spans whose correct reading depends on context or domain conventions, such as sports scores, a…

• Addressing Limited Data in Auditory Attention Decoding with Diffusion Generative Models

  David Rannaleet, Victor Gunnarsson, Bo Bernhardsson, Martin A. Skoglund, Emina Alickovic · 22 July 2026

  Limited training data constrains deep learning models for Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) in hearing aids (HAs). AAD uses electroencephalogram (EEG) data to decode listener's attention, enabling real-time tracking of specific sound sources. However, achieving high AAD performance with short time w…

• CNN Models for Microphone Array Covariance Matrix Upsampling and Acoustic Imaging

  Marianthi Adamopoulou, Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, David Diaz-Guerra, Meng Jiang, Archontis Politis, Seyed Jalaleddin Mousavirad, Tuomas Virtanen, Jan Lundgren · 3 July 2026

  Acoustic imaging visualization is a core methodology in acoustics, enabling spatial analysis of sound sources and acoustic scenes. However, limited sensor availability in practical systems motivate approaches that enhance spatial resolution without increasing the hardware complexity. In this paper, …

• Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

  Chen Si, Qianyi Wu, Chaitanya Amballa, Romit Roy Choudhury · 17 June 2026

  Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information colle…

• HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

  Shaoheng Xu, Chunyi Sun, Jihui Zhang, Amy Bastine, Prasanga N. Samarasinghe, Thushara D. Abhayapala, Hongdong Li · 16 June 2026

  Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior …

• Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

  Yuxuan Chen, Haoyuan Yu, Peize He · 16 June 2026

  Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equaliza…

• Whisper Hallucination Detection and Mitigation via Hidden Representation Steering and Sparse AutoEncoders

  Georgii Aparin, Vadim Popov, Tasnima Sadekova, Assel Yermekova · 8 June 2026

  Whisper, a widely adopted ASR model, is known to suffer from hallucinations - coherent transcriptions generated for non-speech audio entirely disconnected from the input. We investigate whether hallucinations can be detected and mitigated through Whisper's internal representations. We extract audio …

• The Differentiable Auditory Loop (DAL): An ML Framework for Hyper-Personalized Hearing Aids

  Alejandro Ballesta Rosen, Jason Mikiel-Hunter, Julian Maclaren, Jack Collins, Richard F. Lyon, Simon Carlile · 4 June 2026

  Conventional hearing aids rely on fixed, frequency-dependent amplification and compression to manage reduced sensitivity, which often fails to provide sufficient listening support in complex environments, such as situations with multiple speakers (the ``cocktail party'' problem). To more comprehensi…

• EigeNet: Geometry-Informed Multi-Modal Learning for Few-shot Novel View RIR Prediction

  Chong Jing, Zitong Lan, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu · 28 May 2026

  Predicting spatially varying Room Impulse Response (RIR) from sparse observations is a critical but highly challenging inverse problem for immersive spatial audio rendering. In this work, we present EIGENET, a geometry-informed multi-modal framework for few-shot novel view RIR prediction. At its cor…

• Stage-adaptive audio diffusion modeling

  Xuanhao Zhang, Chang Li · 7 May 2026

  Recent progress in diffusion-based audio generation and restoration has substantially improved performance across heterogeneous conditioning regimes, including text-conditioned audio generation and audio-conditioned super-resolution. However, training audio diffusion models remains computationally e…

• BiFormer3D: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

  Shaoheng Xu, Chunyi Sun, Jihui Zhang, Amy Bastine, Prasanga N. Samarasinghe, Thushara D. Abhayapala, Hongdong Li · 31 March 2026

  Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior …

• Few-shot Acoustic Synthesis with Multimodal Flow Matching

  Amandine Brunetto · 20 March 2026

  Generating audio that is acoustically consistent with a scene is essential for immersive virtual environments. Recent neural acoustic field methods enable spatially continuous sound rendering but remain scene-specific, requiring dense audio measurements and costly training for each environment. Few-…

• Fine-grained Soundscape Control for Augmented Hearing

  Seunghyun Oh, Malek Itani, Aseem Gauri, Shyamnath Gollakota · 6 March 2026

  Hearables are becoming ubiquitous, yet their sound controls remain blunt: users can either enable global noise suppression or focus on a single target sound. Real-world acoustic scenes, however, contain many simultaneous sources that users may want to adjust independently. We introduce Aurchestra, t…

• Aurchestra: Fine-Grained, Real-Time Soundscape Control on Resource-Constrained Hearables

  Seunghyun Oh, Malek Itani, Aseem Gauri, Shyamnath Gollakota · 3 March 2026

  Hearables are becoming ubiquitous, yet their sound controls remain blunt: users can either enable global noise suppression or focus on a single target sound. Real-world acoustic scenes, however, contain many simultaneous sources that users may want to adjust independently. We introduce Aurchestra, t…

• Scattering Transform for Auditory Attention Decoding

  Ren\'e Pallenberg, Fabrice Katzberg, Alfred Mertins, Marco Maass · 27 February 2026

  The use of hearing aids will increase in the coming years due to demographic change. One open problem that remains to be solved by a new generation of hearing aids is the cocktail party problem. A possible solution is electroencephalography-based auditory attention decoding. This has been the subjec…

• Reciprocal Latent Fields for Precomputed Sound Propagation

  Hugo Seut\'e, Pranai Vasudev, Etienne Richan, Louis-Xavier Buffoni · 9 February 2026

  Realistic sound propagation is essential for immersion in a virtual scene, yet physically accurate wave-based simulations remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Wave coding methods address this limitation by precomputing and compressing impulse responses of a given scene into…

• End-to-end audio-visual learning for cochlear implant sound coding simulations in noisy environments

  Meng-Ping Lin, Enoch Hsin-Ho Huang, Shao-Yi Chien, Yu Tsao · 30 January 2026

  The cochlear implant (CI) is a successful biomedical device that enables individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss to perceive sound through electrical stimulation, yet listening in noise remains challenging. Recent deep learning advances offer promising potential for CI sound coding by integ…

• Modelling the Effects of Hearing Loss on Neural Coding in the Auditory Midbrain with Variational Conditioning

  Lloyd Pellatt, Fotios Drakopoulos, Shievanie Sabesan, Nicholas A. Lesica · 23 January 2026

  The mapping from sound to neural activity that underlies hearing is highly non-linear. The first few stages of this mapping in the cochlea have been modelled successfully, with biophysical models built by hand and, more recently, with DNN models trained on datasets simulated by biophysical models. M…

• MMMOS: Multi-domain Multi-axis Audio Quality Assessment

  Yi-Cheng Lin, Jia-Hung Chen, Hung-yi Lee · 13 January 2026

  Accurate audio quality estimation is essential for developing and evaluating audio generation, retrieval, and enhancement systems. Existing non-intrusive assessment models predict a single Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for speech, merging diverse perceptual factors and failing to generalize beyond speech…

• From Preoperative CT to Postmastoidectomy Mesh Construction: Mastoidectomy Shape Prediction for Cochlear Implant Surgery

  Yike Zhang, Eduardo Davalos, Dingjie Su, Ange Lou, Jack Noble · 12 January 2026

  Cochlear Implant (CI) surgery treats severe hearing loss by inserting an electrode array into the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve. An important step in this procedure is mastoidectomy, which removes part of the mastoid region of the temporal bone to provide surgical access. Accurate mastoide…

• From Preoperative CT to Postmastoidectomy Mesh Construction:1Mastoidectomy Shape Prediction for Cochlear Implant Surgery

  Yike Zhang, Eduardo Davalos, Dingjie Su, Ange Lou, Jack Noble · 9 January 2026

  Cochlear Implant (CI) surgery treats severe hearing loss by inserting an electrode array into the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve. An important step in this procedure is mastoidectomy, which removes part of the mastoid region of the temporal bone to provide surgical access. Accurate mastoide…

• Neural personal sound zones with flexible bright zone control

  Wenye Zhu, Jun Tang, Xiaofei Li · 12 December 2025

  Personal sound zone (PSZ) reproduction system, which attempts to create distinct virtual acoustic scenes for different listeners at their respective positions within the same spatial area using one loudspeaker array, is a fundamental technology in the application of virtual reality. For practical ap…

• Enhancing XR Auditory Realism via Multimodal Scene-Aware Acoustic Rendering

  Tianyu Xu, Jihan Li, Penghe Zu, Pranav Sahay, Maruchi Kim, Jack Obeng-Marnu, Farley Miller, Xun Qian, Katrina Passarella, Mahitha Rachumalla, Rajeev Nongpiur, D. Shin · 18 November 2025

  In Extended Reality (XR), rendering sound that accurately simulates real-world acoustics is pivotal in creating lifelike and believable virtual experiences. However, existing XR spatial audio rendering methods often struggle with real-time adaptation to diverse physical scenes, causing a sensory mis…

• Forecasting Spoken Language Development in Children with Cochlear Implants Using Preimplantation MRI

  Yanlin Wang, Di Yuan, Shani Dettman, Dawn Choo, Emily Shimeng Xu, Denise Thomas, Maura E Ryan, Patrick C M Wong, Nancy M Young · 17 November 2025

  Cochlear implants (CI) significantly improve spoken language in children with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), yet outcomes remain more variable than in children with normal hearing. This variability cannot be reliably predicted for individual children using age at implantation …