Targeted Neural Audio Embeddings

Task-targeted brain encoding from Qwen-Audio speech features to cortical activations.


Targeted Neural Audio Embeddings develops a brain encoding pipeline that maps complex speech features to cortical responses by isolating task-relevant audio subspaces.

Highlights

  • Built a brain encoding model to map Qwen-Audio speech representations to cortical activations by extracting targeted task subspaces from large audio-language embeddings.
  • Processed 150k+ audio examples across 15 benchmark datasets to engineer targeted embeddings that isolate specific auditory signals such as emotion and reasoning.
  • Performed rigorous dimensionality sweeps across network architectures to maximize the performance gap between on-task signal capture and task-irrelevant noise.

Context

Research project with Columbia Zuckerman Institute.