Southern University of Science and Technology

Researchers report SAGE, a switch-aware EEG-guided soft gating framework for target speaker extraction, posted to arXiv as a preprint on August 3, 2026 and not yet peer reviewed. Under in-trial auditory attention switching, neural noise and intrinsic latency can delay or destabilize attention tracking, and conventional methods often cause discontinuities at switching points. SAGE treats in-trial switching as dynamic selection, generating two candidate speech streams with a robust separator and using an EEG-guided switch-aware gating module to produce smooth fusion weights and suppress transition artifacts. It integrates latency-compensated alignment and an uncertainty-driven conservative strategy, outperforms baselines, achieves 8.67 dB SI-SDR and 88.24% STOI, and reduces average switching latency to 2.04 s.