@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-temporal,
    title = "Temporal Precision Matters: Brain-Tuning Speech Language Models with Millisecond-Resolution Neural Signals",
    author = "Zhang, Zhejun  and
      Zhou, Wenqing  and
      Xu, Haozhe  and
      Zhang, Lin  and
      Li, Lei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1911/",
    pages = "41208--41226",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Brain-tuning enhances brain alignment and downstream performance by fine-tuning speech language models with neural recordings. However, previous work relies primarily on fMRI, whose temporal resolution integrates neural activity over seconds, blending distinct processing stages into a single supervision signal and precluding temporally targeted training. We introduce ECoG-tuning, which leverages electrocorticography{'}s millisecond precision to train speech language models. We design temporally targeted windows{---}a speech window capturing acoustic-phonetic encoding and a language window capturing higher-order linguistic processing{---}grounded in neuroscientific findings about temporal encoding hierarchies. Evaluating three models on the Podcast ECoG dataset, we find that ECoG-tuning significantly improves brain alignment over pretrained and distillation baselines. Notably, full spatiotemporal dynamics yield 7{--}17{\%} higher alignment than time-averaged supervision across models, and language-window tuning produces larger gains in higher-order language regions, indicating that temporal precision provides additional training value. Moreover, ECoG-tuned models consistently improve or maintain downstream performance. Overall, our work provides initial evidence that electrophysiology is a viable brain-tuning modality, demonstrating how neuroscientific insights into processing hierarchies can inform principled model training strategies. Code is available at [https://github.com/Mochizuki-BUPT/ECoG-Tuning-main](https://github.com/Mochizuki-BUPT/ECoG-Tuning-main)."
}