# Bottleneck Transformer-Based Approach for Improved Automatic STOI Score Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15484/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11605/) (2021)
- [MOSNet: Deep Learning based Objective Assessment for Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08352/) (2019)
- [Generalization Ability of MOS Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02635/) (2021)
- [Quality-Net: An End-to-End Non-intrusive Speech Quality Assessment Model based on BLSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05344/) (2018)
- [MBNet: MOS Prediction for Synthesized Speech with Mean-Bias Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00110/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-based Non-Intrusive Multi-Objective Speech Assessment Model with Cross-Domain Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02363/) (2021)
- [STOI-Net: A Deep Learning based Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Assessment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04292/) (2020)
- [MBI-Net: A Non-Intrusive Multi-Branched Speech Intelligibility Prediction Model for Hearing Aids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03305/) (2022)
- [Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing-Impaired Users using Intermediate ASR Features and Human Memory Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13611/) (2024)
- [A survey and an extensive evaluation of popular audio declipping methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07663/) (2020)
- [Pre-trained Speech Representations as Feature Extractors for Speech Quality Assessment in Online Conferencing Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00259/) (2022)
- [MTI-Net: A Multi-Target Speech Intelligibility Prediction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03310/) (2022)
- [Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing Aids using Whisper and Metadata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09548/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Mean Opinion Scores in Speech Quality Assessment: Aggregation through Quantized Distribution Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18307/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this study, we have presented a novel approach to predict the Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) metric using a bottleneck transformer architecture. Traditional methods for calculating STOI typically requires clean reference speech, which limits their applicability in the real world. To address this, numerous deep learning-based nonintrusive speech assessment models have garnered significant interest. Many studies have achieved commendable performance, but there is room for further improvement. We propose the use of bottleneck transformer, incorporating convolution blocks for learning frame-level features and a multi-head self-attention (MHSA) layer to aggregate the information. These components enable the transformer to focus on the key aspects of the input data. Our model has shown higher correlation and lower mean squared error for both seen and unseen scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art model using self-supervised learning (SSL) and spectral features as inputs.