Phoneme- vs. Character-Level Targets and Selective State-Space Models for Intracortical Brain-to-Text
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Phoneme- vs. Character-Level Targets and Selective State-Space Models for Intracortical Brain-to-Text
Abstract:State-of-the-art intracortical brain-to-text systems pair a neural-sequence phone decoder with an external language model. Two design axes remain underexplored: whether selective state-space models (Mamba) improve on recurrent decoders, and how the output target (phonetic vs.\ character) interacts with that choice. On the public Brain-to-Text '25 benchmark, we study a controlled 2x2 grid (GRU vs.\ hybrid Mamba decoder; phonetic vs.\ character targets) trained with a CTC objective under one reproducible protocol. The recurrent baseline remains strongest: the best phonetic GRU reaches 12.62\% PER and 21.19\% WER, while the best textual GRU after LM rescoring reaches 13.39\% CER and 26.28\% WER. The Mamba hybrid is competitive but does not surpass it. Ablations isolate architectural contributions, and error analysis shows representation-dependent failures: articulatory-like phoneme confusions vs.\ lexical and word-boundary errors.
| Comments: | 6 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables, submitted to IberSPEECH 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Signal Processing (eess.SP) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.26751 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2607.26751v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.26751
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez [view email][v1] Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:46:08 UTC (8,973 KB)
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