DHGCN: Dual HyperGraph Convolutional Network for EEG-Based Auditory Attention Detection

Auditory attention detection (AAD) aims to identify the attended speaker in multi-talker environments by analyzing brain activity recorded through neural monitoring techniques. Recent AAD approaches have achieved great progress in improving detection accuracy. However, they still face challenges in capturing complex spatio-temporal dependencies and high-order nonlinear relationships across brain regions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DHGCN, a dual hypergraph convolutional network that integrates a hypergraph modeling module, a dual-branch hypergraph learning (DHGL) module, and a feature fusion module. Specifically, the hypergraph modeling module constructs spatial and temporal hypergraphs from EEG signals, enabling the representation of high-order relationships among channels and time points. The DHGL module comprises two parallel branches: a spatial branch that learns high-order spatial dependencies across EEG channels, and a temporal branch that captures complex temporal dependencies. Each branch uses its corresponding hypergraph structure, which is established during the modeling phase. The feature fusion module then aggregates spatial and temporal representations from both branches to support robust auditory attention classification. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DHGCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art AAD models. It achieves superior classification performance while reducing the trainable parameters count by over 50% compared to the state-of-the-art models. Code is available at: https://github.com/nobody1219/DHGCN.git.