Beyond Hearing

Beyond Hearing: Learning Task-Agnostic ExG Representations from Earphones via Physiology-Informed Tokenization



Abstract


Electrophysiological (ExG) signals offer valuable insights into human physiology, yet building foundation models that generalize across everyday tasks remains challenging due to two key limitations: (i) insufficient data diversity, as most ExG recordings are collected in controlled labs with bulky, expensive devices; and (ii) task-specific model designs that require tailored processing (i.e., targeted frequency filters) and architectures, which limit generalization across tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach for scalable, task-agnostic ExG monitoring in the wild. We collected 50 hours of unobtrusive free-living ExG data with an earphone-based hardware prototype to narrow the data diversity gap. At the core of our approach is Physiology-informed Multi-band Tokenization (PiMT), which decomposes ExG signals into 12 physiology-informed tokens, followed by a reconstruction task to learn robust representations. This enables adaptive feature recognition across the full frequency spectrum while capturing task-relevant information. Experiments on our new DailySense dataset—the first to enable ExG-based analysis across five human senses—together with four public ExG benchmarks, demonstrate that PiMT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks.


Publications


Beyond Hearing: Learning Task-Agnostic ExG Representations from Earphones via Physiology-Informed Tokenization
Hyungjun Yoon, Seungjoo Lee, Yu Yvonne Wu, Xiaomeng Chen, Taiting Lu, Freddy Yifei Liu, Taeckyung Lee, Hyeongheon Cha, Haochen Zhao, Gaoteng Zhao, Dongyao Chen, Cecilia Mascolo, Sung-Ju Lee, Lili Qiu
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
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People


Hyungjun Yoon

KAIST

Seungjoo Lee

CMU

Yu Yvonne Wu

Dartmouth

Xiaomeng Chen

SJTU

Taiting Lu

Penn State

Freddy Yifei Liu

CMU

Taeckyung Lee

KAIST

Hyeongheon Cha

KAIST

Haochen Zhao

UCLA

Gaoteng Zhao

Northwest

Dongyao Chen

SJTU

Cecilia Mascolo

Cambridge

Sung-Ju Lee

KAIST

Lili Qiu

UT Austin