MEGConformer: Conformer-Based MEG Decoder for Robust Speech and Phoneme Classification

Xabier de Zuazo; Ibon Saratxaga; Eva Navas

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arXiv · 2512.01443

MEGConformer: Conformer-Based MEG Decoder for Robust Speech and Phoneme Classification

Xabier de Zuazo·Ibon Saratxaga·Eva Navas

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Abstract

Decoding speech-related information from non-invasive MEG is a key step toward scalable brain-computer interfaces. We present compact Conformer-based decoders on the LibriBrain 2025 PNPL benchmark for two core tasks: Speech Detection and Phoneme Classification. Our approach adapts a compact Conformer to raw 306-channel MEG signals, with a lightweight convolutional projection layer and task-specific heads. For Speech Detection, a MEG-oriented SpecAugment provided a first exploration of MEG-specific augmentation. For Phoneme Classification, we used inverse-square-root class weighting and a dynamic grouping loader to handle 100-sample averaged examples. In addition, a simple instance-level normalization proved critical to mitigate distribution shifts on the holdout split. Using the official Standard track splits and F1-macro for model selection, our best systems achieved 88.9% (Speech) and 65.8% (Phoneme) on the leaderboard, winning the Phoneme Classification Standard track. For further implementation details, the technical documentation, source code, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/neural2speech/libribrain-experiments.

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BibTeX RIS

Xabier de Zuazo, Ibon Saratxaga, Eva Navas. 2025-12-01. MEGConformer: Conformer-Based MEG Decoder for Robust Speech and Phoneme Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01443

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