Self-supervised language models are very effective at predicting high-level cortical responses during language comprehension. However, the best current models of lower-level auditory processing in the human brain rely on either hand-constructed acoustic filters or representations from supervised audio neural networks. In this work, we capitalize on the progress of self-supervised speech representation learning (SSL) to create new state-of-the-art models of the human auditory system. Compared against acoustic baselines, phonemic features, and supervised models, representations from the middle layers of self-supervised models (APC, wav2vec, wav2vec 2.0, and HuBERT) consistently yield the best prediction performance for fMRI recordings within the auditory cortex (AC). Brain areas involved in low-level auditory processing exhibit a preference for earlier SSL model layers, whereas higher-level semantic areas prefer later layers. We show that these trends are due to the models' ability to encode information at multiple linguistic levels (acoustic, phonetic, and lexical) along their representation depth. Overall, these results show that self-supervised models effectively capture the hierarchy of information relevant to different stages of speech processing in human cortex.

本文回顾了目前人类低级听觉处理的现有模型，并利用自学语言模型技术创建了新的人类听觉系统的先进模型。结果表明，与声学基线、音素特征和监督模型相比，来自自监督模型中间层的表示可以显著提高对听觉皮层的fMRI记录的预测性能，并且不同的听觉处理区域对信息的不同语言层次表现出偏好。

自监督音频模型有效解释人类大脑对语音的反应