{"ID":2841830,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11473","arxiv_id":"2511.11473","title":"Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations","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. More information can be found on our website: https://proactivehearing.cs.washington.edu/","short_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 conve...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11473","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11473v1","authors":"[\"Guilin Hu\",\"Malek Itani\",\"Tuochao Chen\",\"Shyamnath Gollakota\"]","published":"2025-11-14T16:44:48Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.SD\",\"eess.AS\"]","methods":"[]","project_urls":"[\"https://proactivehearing.cs.washington.edu/\"]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":607081,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2841830,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11473","paper_title":"Proactive Hearing Assistants that Isolate Egocentric Conversations","repo_url":"https://github.com/guilinhu/proactive_hearing_assistant","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}