Low-Power End-to-End Cochlear Implant Speech Denoising with Spiking Neural Networks

Ludovic Boulanger; Sean U. N. Wood

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2608.28493

Low-Power End-to-End Cochlear Implant Speech Denoising with Spiking Neural Networks

Ludovic Boulanger·Sean U. N. Wood

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Cochlear implants (CI) restore hearing for individuals with severe to profound hearing loss. However, CI users often struggle to understand speech in noisy environments. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown promise in enhancing speech for CI users, yet their high energy demands make them non-ideal for low-power CI processors. Spiking neural networks (SNN), on the other hand, offer comparable performance with significantly lower energy consumption. Hence, we propose a novel SNN inspired by the Deep ACE architecture that simultaneously performs speech enhancement and CI coding. Our model achieves competitive vocoded short-time objective intelligibility (VSTOI) and signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SNRi) scores compared to Deep ACE, while achieving more than a sixfold reduction in energy consumption.

Explore related subjects

cs.SD cs.NE eess.AS

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Ludovic Boulanger, Sean U. N. Wood. 2026-08-28. Low-Power End-to-End Cochlear Implant Speech Denoising with Spiking Neural Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28493

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

Discover connections

cs.NE subject cs.SD subject eess.AS subject

Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related discoveries

arXiv2026

A Systematic Approach to Mechanism Design with Stochastic Dynamic Stability

We consider a resource allocation problem with strategic agents that have private stochastic satisfaction functions and local constraints. To achieve a global optimal solution, we propose an incentive mechanism that induces a game among the agents. For the payment function of the mechanism, we construct a family of quadratic functions using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach that implements the social welfare maximizing outcome on the unique Nash equilibrium (NE) of the induced game while ensuring budget balance and individual rationality. Moreover, we propose a decentralized variable sample-size proximal best-response (VS-PBR) algorithm with Krasnoselskij iteration where only aggregate information is available to the agents. The algorithm is dynamically stable, as it is proven to converge in the mean-square sense to the NE of the game. The efficiency of the mechanism is then investigated on the Sioux Falls City transportation network, where electric vehicle (EV) users jointly select their destination and route.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Accurate Plate Reverb Parameter Estimation Using Two-Stage Evolutionary Search

We describe our submission to Task A of the 1st DAFx parameter estimation challenge. The task is to recover the six physical parameters of a simulated metal-plate reverberator -- its dimensions and material properties -- from a single impulse response (IR). We treat this as a black-box optimization: candidate parameter sets are fed to the simulator and scored by a loss against the target IR. The method has two stages. The first uses CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimizer, to recover five of the six parameters, comparing IRs under an amplitude-normalized loss. Amplitude normalization makes the search robust but discards the cue to the sixth parameter, the plate's surface density; a second stage therefore estimates it alone, with a ternary search on the un-normalized loss. As the choice of loss strongly affects the search, we select it beforehand, and analyze why compression in the common multi-scale spectral loss degrades recovery. Finally, we test our method on a validation set of 50 IRs, discuss a pathological failure mode, and ablate to justify having two different stages instead of a unified CMA-ES search.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

DiffAnon: Diffusion-based Prosody Control for Voice Anonymization

To preserve or not to preserve prosody is a central question in voice anonymization. Prosody conveys meaning and affect, yet is tightly coupled with speaker identity. Existing methods either discard prosody for privacy or lack a principled mechanism to control the utility-privacy trade-off, operating at fixed design points. We propose DiffAnon, a diffusion-based anonymization method with classifier-free guidance (CFG) that provides explicit, continuous inference-time control over prosody preservation. DiffAnon refines acoustic detail over semantic embeddings of an RVQ codec, enabling smooth interpolation between anonymization strength and prosodic fidelity within a single model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first voice anonymization framework to provide structured, interpolatable inference-time prosody control. Experiments demonstrate structured trade-off behavior, achieving strong utility while maintaining competitive privacy across controllable operating points.

eess.AS↗