RAMamba-Net: A Reliability-Aware and Mamba-Based Multimodal Fusion Network for Auditory Attention Detection

Abstract

Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the attended speaker from physiological signals, supporting neuro-steered hearing devices and natural human-machine interaction. Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant modality for AAD but provides incomplete evidence in naturalistic audio-visual scenes, motivating EEG and electrooculography (EOG) fusion. Existing approaches remain limited by weak cross-modal interaction, inefficient temporal modeling, and low robustness to sample variations. To address the limitations, we propose RAMamba-Net, a reliability-aware Mamba-based multimodal fusion network for AAD. RAMamba-Net employs a Mamba-enhanced band-aware convolutional Transformer to capture band-specific EEG patterns and long-range temporal dynamics. A dual-branch temporal-spatial encoder models EOG temporal and inter-channel dependencies. Cross-modal attention enables explicit modality interaction. Then, a reliability-aware module is introduced to estimate sample-wise modality weights for feature and prediction consistency, thereby enhancing multimodal fusion. Experiments on two AAD benchmarks demonstrate that RAMamba-Net effectively exploits complementary EEG-EOG information, yielding accuracy gains of 5.76% over unimodal baselines, together with more robust decoding and discriminative representations. Further analyses show that explicit cross-modal interaction improves multimodal alignment, while the reliability-aware module suppresses unreliable modality evidence and is robust to signal perturbation and parameter variation.