Measuring Robustness of Speech Recognition from MEG Signals Under Distribution Shift

This study investigates robust speech-related decoding from non-invasive MEG signals using the LibriBrain phoneme-classification benchmark from the 2025 PNPL competition. We compare residual convolutional neural networks (CNNs), an STFT-based CNN, and a CNN--Transformer hybrid, while also examining the effects of group averaging, label balancing, repeated grouping, normalization strategies, and data augmentation. Across our in-house implementations, preprocessing and data-configuration choices matter more than additional architectural complexity, among which instance normalization emerges as the most influential modification for generalization. The strongest of our own models, a CNN with group averaging, label balancing, repeated grouping, and instance normalization, achieves 60.95% F1-macro on the test split, compared with 39.53% for the plain CNN baseline. However, most of our models, without instance normalization, show substantial validation-to-test degradation, indicating that distribution shift induced by different normalization statistics is a major obstacle to generalization in our experiments. By contrast, MEGConformer maintains 64.09% F1-macro on both validation and test, and saliency-map analysis is qualitatively consistent with this contrast: weaker models exhibit more concentrated or repetitive phoneme-sensitive patterns across splits, whereas MEGConformer appears more distributed. Overall, the results suggest that improving the reliability of non-invasive phoneme decoding will likely require better handling of normalization-related distribution shift while also addressing the challenge of single-trial decoding.