Related papers: Auditory power-law activation-avalanches exhibit a…
Growth patterns of complex systems predict how they change in sizes, numbers, masses, etc. Understanding growth is important, especially for many biological, ecological, urban, and socioeconomic systems. One noteworthy growth behavior is…
The information processing abilities of a multilayer neural network with a number of hidden units scaling as the input dimension are studied using statistical mechanics methods. The mapping from the input layer to the hidden units is…
Recent studies suggest that the representations learned by large language models (LLMs) are partially aligned to those of the human brain. However, whether and why this alignment score arises from a similar sequence of computations remains…
Humans encode information into sounds by controlling articulators and decode information from sounds using the auditory apparatus. This paper introduces CiwaGAN, a model of human spoken language acquisition that combines unsupervised…
This work reviews the human auditory system, elucidating some of the specialized mechanisms and non-linear pathways along the chain of events between physical sound and its perception. Customary relationships between frequency, time, and…
Intrinsic brain activity is characterized by highly structured co-activations between different regions, whose origin is still under debate. In this paper, we address the question whether it is possible to unveil how the underlying…
A popular approach to decompose the neural bases of language consists in correlating, across individuals, the brain responses to different stimuli (e.g. regular speech versus scrambled words, sentences, or paragraphs). Although successful,…
Recent progress in auditory intelligence has yielded high-performing systems for sound event detection (SED), acoustic scene classification (ASC), automated audio captioning (AAC), and audio question answering (AQA). Yet these tasks remain…
Despite the strong performance of large audio language models (LALMs) in various tasks, exactly how and where they integrate acoustic features with textual context remains unclear. We adapt causal tracing to investigate the internal…
Biological signaling is imagined as a combination of activation and transport. The former is triggered by local molecular interactions and the latter is the result of molecular diffusion. However, other fundamental physical principles of…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
Shedding light onto how biological systems represent, process and store information in noisy environments is a key and challenging goal. A stimulating, though controversial, hypothesis poses that operating in dynamical regimes near the edge…
A high efficiency hardware integration of neural networks benefits from realizing nonlinearity, network connectivity and learning fully in a physical substrate. Multiple systems have recently implemented some or all of these operations, yet…
Earable acoustic sensing offers a powerful and non-invasive modality for capturing fine-grained auditory and physiological signals directly from the ear canal, enabling continuous and context-aware monitoring of cognitive states. As earable…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding text and generating high-quality responses. However, a critical distinction from human cognition is their typical lack of a distinct internal `reading'…
Humans are surrounded by audio signals that include both speech and non-speech sounds. The recognition and understanding of speech and non-speech audio events, along with a profound comprehension of the relationship between them, constitute…
Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…
How the information microscopically processed by individual neurons is integrated and used in organizing the behavior of an animal is a central question in neuroscience. The coherence of neuronal dynamics over different scales has been…
The presence of self-organized criticality in biology is often evidenced by a power-law scaling of event size distributions, which can be measured by linear regression on logarithmic axes. We show here that such a procedure does not…
Waves, such as light and sound, inherently bounce and mix due to multiple scattering induced by the complex material objects that surround us. This scattering process severely scrambles the information carried by waves, challenging…