Unlocking Non-Invasive Brain-to-Text

Dulhan Jayalath, Gilad Landau, Oiwi Parker Jones

Keywords: Brain--Computer Interfaces and Neural Prostheses, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Brain Imaging

TL;DR: We overcome barriers to achieve the first signals in non-invasive brain-to-text, with 2.6× prior BLEU scores using contextual rescoring, predictive in-filling, and resolving cross-dataset scaling—unblocking the path to surgery-free speech BCIs.

Abstract: Despite major advances in surgical brain-to-text (B2T), i.e. transcribing speech from invasive brain recordings, non-invasive alternatives have yet to surpass even chance on standard metrics. This remains a barrier to building a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) capable of restoring communication in paralysed individuals without surgery. Here, we present the first non-invasive B2T result that significantly exceeds these critical baselines, **raising BLEU $\mathbf{1.4\mathrm{-}2.6\times}$** over prior work. This result is driven by three contributions: (1) we extend recent word-classification models with LLM-based rescoring, transforming single-word predictors into closed-vocabulary B2T systems; (2) we introduce a predictive in-filling approach to handle out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, substantially expanding the effective vocabulary; and (3) we demonstrate, for the first time, how to scale non-invasive B2T models across datasets, unlocking deep learning at scale and **improving accuracy $\mathbf{2.1\mathrm{-}2.3\times}$**. Through these contributions, we offer new insights into the roles of data quality and vocabulary size. Together, our results remove a major obstacle to realising practical non-invasive B2T systems.

Submission Number: 10