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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