@inproceedings{hu-etal-2025-proactive,
title = "Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations",
author = "Hu, Guilin and
Itani, Malek and
Chen, Tuochao and
Gollakota, Shyamnath",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1289/",
pages = "25377--25394",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
abstract = "We introduce proactive hearing assistants that automatically identify and separate the wearer{'}s conversation partners, without requiring explicit prompts. Our system operates on egocentric binaural audio and uses the wearer{'}s self-speech as an anchor, leveraging turn-taking behavior and dialogue dynamics to infer conversational partners and suppress others. To enable real-time, on-device operation, we propose a dual-model architecture: a lightweight streaming model runs every 12.5 ms for low-latency extraction of the conversation partners, while a slower model runs less frequently to capture longer-range conversational dynamics. Results on real-world 2- and 3-speaker conversation test sets, collected with binaural egocentric hardware from 11 participants totaling 6.8 hours, show generalization in identifying and isolating conversational partners in multi-conversation settings. Our work marks a step toward hearing assistants that adapt proactively to conversational dynamics and engagement."
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<abstract>We introduce proactive hearing assistants that automatically identify and separate the wearer’s conversation partners, without requiring explicit prompts. Our system operates on egocentric binaural audio and uses the wearer’s self-speech as an anchor, leveraging turn-taking behavior and dialogue dynamics to infer conversational partners and suppress others. To enable real-time, on-device operation, we propose a dual-model architecture: a lightweight streaming model runs every 12.5 ms for low-latency extraction of the conversation partners, while a slower model runs less frequently to capture longer-range conversational dynamics. Results on real-world 2- and 3-speaker conversation test sets, collected with binaural egocentric hardware from 11 participants totaling 6.8 hours, show generalization in identifying and isolating conversational partners in multi-conversation settings. Our work marks a step toward hearing assistants that adapt proactively to conversational dynamics and engagement.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations
%A Hu, Guilin
%A Itani, Malek
%A Chen, Tuochao
%A Gollakota, Shyamnath
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-332-6
%F hu-etal-2025-proactive
%X We introduce proactive hearing assistants that automatically identify and separate the wearer’s conversation partners, without requiring explicit prompts. Our system operates on egocentric binaural audio and uses the wearer’s self-speech as an anchor, leveraging turn-taking behavior and dialogue dynamics to infer conversational partners and suppress others. To enable real-time, on-device operation, we propose a dual-model architecture: a lightweight streaming model runs every 12.5 ms for low-latency extraction of the conversation partners, while a slower model runs less frequently to capture longer-range conversational dynamics. Results on real-world 2- and 3-speaker conversation test sets, collected with binaural egocentric hardware from 11 participants totaling 6.8 hours, show generalization in identifying and isolating conversational partners in multi-conversation settings. Our work marks a step toward hearing assistants that adapt proactively to conversational dynamics and engagement.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1289/
%P 25377-25394
Markdown (Informal)
[Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations](https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1289/) (Hu et al., EMNLP 2025)
ACL