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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising research direction for building power-efficient information processing systems, especially for temporal tasks such as speech recognition. In SNNs, delays refer to the time needed for one spike…
Within the soundscapes of open-plan offices, irrelevant speech has consistently been reported as the most distracting, and causing performance decrements for workers. Notwithstanding this generalization, the 'babble' created by multiple…
Humans and other animals base their decisions on noisy sensory input. Much work has therefore been devoted to understanding the computations that underly such decisions. The problem has been studied in a variety of tasks and with stimuli of…
Slow oscillations are electrical potential oscillations with a spectral peak frequency of $\sim$0.8 Hz, and hallmark the electroencephalogram during slow-wave sleep. Recent studies have indicated a causal contribution of slow oscillations…
The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking,…
In this paper, we consider different classes of subshifts and study their perturbations obtained by forbidding sequences that contain a given word as a subword. We show that the perturbations of sofic shifts are sofic. Though not true for…
In this paper we report on a system, "SpeechJammer", which can be used to disturb people's speech. In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect…
Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…
Noise pollution has been rising alongside urbanization. Literature shows that disorganized background noise decreases attention. Timed testing, an attention-demanding stress task, has become increasingly important in assessing students'…
We study the effect of noise on a Josephson junction that, coupled to a linear $RLC$ resonator, can oscillate at two frequencies. To establish the global stability of the attractors, we estimate the position of the separatrix, an essential…
Preserving speech intelligibility is a minimum requirement for speech codecs in communication. Recently, very low-bitrate neural codecs have gained interest for replacing classical codecs, reinforcing the need to evaluate whether…
Analytic, first-principles performance modeling of distributed-memory applications is difficult due to a wide spectrum of random disturbances caused by the application and the system. These disturbances (commonly called "noise") destroy the…
Language models suffer from various degenerate behaviors. These differ between tasks: machine translation (MT) exhibits length bias, while tasks like story generation exhibit excessive repetition. Recent work has attributed the difference…
In many methods of sound event detection (SED), a segmented time frame is regarded as one data sample to model training. The durations of sound events greatly depend on the sound event class, e.g., the sound event "fan" has a long duration,…
As reading on mobile devices is becoming more ubiquitous, content is consumed in shorter intervals and is punctuated by frequent interruptions. In this work, we explore the best way to mitigate the effects of reading interruptions on longer…
As large language models are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems that accumulate extensive context, understanding how distracting information affects long-context performance becomes critical. Prior…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
We study both analytically and numerically the effect of presynaptic noise on the transmission of information in attractor neural networks. The noise occurs on a very short-time scale compared to that for the neuron dynamics and it produces…
Large audio-language models (LALMs) unify speech and text processing, but their robustness in noisy real-world settings remains underexplored. We investigate how irrelevant audio, such as silence, synthetic noise, and environmental sounds,…
We examine a naming game with two agents trying to establish a common vocabulary for n objects. Such efforts lead to the emergence of language that allows for an efficient communication and exhibits some degree of homonymy and synonymy.…