DGSD: Dynamical Graph Self-Distillation for EEG-Based Auditory Spatial
  Attention Detection
Cunhang Fan Hongyu Zhang Wei Huang Jun Xue Jianhua Tao Jiangyan Yi Zhao Lv Xiaopei Wu
Auditory Attention Detection (AAD) aims to detect target speaker from brain
signals in a multi-speaker environment. Although EEG-based AAD methods have
shown promising results in recent years, current approaches primarily rely on
traditional convolutional neural network designed for processing Euclidean data
like images. This makes it challenging to handle EEG signals, which possess
non-Euclidean characteristics. In order to address this problem, this paper
proposes a dynamical graph self-distillation (DGSD) approach for AAD, which
does not require speech stimuli as input. Specifically, to effectively
represent the non-Euclidean properties of EEG signals, dynamical graph
convolutional networks are applied to represent the graph structure of EEG
signals, which can also extract crucial features related to auditory spatial
attention in EEG signals. In addition, to further improve AAD detection
performance, self-distillation, consisting of feature distillation and
hierarchical distillation strategies at each layer, is integrated. These
strategies leverage features and classification results from the deepest
network layers to guide the learning of shallow layers. Our experiments are
conducted on two publicly available datasets, KUL and DTU. Under a 1-second
time window, we achieve results of 90.0\% and 79.6\% accuracy on KUL and DTU,
respectively. We compare our DGSD method with competitive baselines, and the
experimental results indicate that the detection performance of our proposed
DGSD method is not only superior to the best reproducible baseline but also
significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 100
times.