TR2023-016

Reverberation as Supervision for Speech Separation


Abstract:

This paper proposes reverberation as supervision (RAS), a novel un- supervised loss function for single-channel reverberant speech sepa- ration. Prior methods for unsupervised separation required the syn- thesis of mixtures of mixtures or assumed the existence of a teacher model, making them difficult to consider as potential methods ex- plaining the emergence of separation abilities in an animal’s audi- tory system. We assume the availability of two-channel mixtures at training time, and train a neural network to separate the sources given one of the channels as input such that the other channel may be predicted from the separated sources. As the relationship be- tween the room impulse responses (RIRs) of each channel depends on the locations of the sources, which are unknown to the network, the network cannot rely on learning that relationship. Instead, our proposed loss function fits each of the separated sources to the mix- ture in the target channel via Wiener filtering, and compares the resulting mixture to the ground-truth one. We show that minimiz- ing the scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR) of the pre- dicted right-channel mixture with respect to the ground truth implic- itly guides the network towards separating the left-channel sources. On a semi-supervised reverberant speech separation task based on the WHAMR! dataset, using training data where just 5% (resp., 10%) of the mixtures are labeled with associated isolated sources, we achieve 70% (resp., 78%) of the SI-SDR improvement obtained when training with supervision on the full training set, while a model trained only on the labeled data obtains 43% (resp., 45%).

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2023
      Date: Sunday, June 4, 2023 - Saturday, June 10, 2023
      Location: Rhodes Island, Greece
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Suhas Lohit; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Joshua Rapp; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2023, which is being held in Rhodes Island, Greece from June 4-10, 2023.

        Organization

        Petros Boufounos is serving as General Co-Chair of the conference this year, where he has been involved in all aspects of conference planning and execution.

        Perry Wang is the organizer of a special session on Radar-Assisted Perception (RAP), which will be held on Wednesday, June 7. The session will feature talks on signal processing and deep learning for radar perception, pose estimation, and mutual interference mitigation with speakers from both academia (Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Tech, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and industry (Mitsubishi Electric, Bosch, Waveye).

        Anthony Vetro is the co-organizer of the Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS), which will be held on Monday, June 5, and feature invited talks from leaders in both academia and industry on timely topics related to autonomous systems.

        Sponsorship

        MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, June 8. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

        MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Rabab Ward, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Alexander Waibel, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

        Technical Program

        MERL is presenting 13 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation and speech enhancement, radar imaging, depth estimation, motor fault detection, time series recovery, and point clouds. One workshop paper has also been accepted for presentation on self-supervised music source separation.

        Perry Wang has been invited to give a keynote talk on Wi-Fi sensing and related standards activities at the Workshop on Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), which will be held on Sunday, June 4.

        Additionally, Anthony Vetro will present a Perspective Talk on Physics-Grounded Machine Learning, which is scheduled for Thursday, June 8.

        About ICASSP

        ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event attracts more than 2000 participants each year.
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  • Related Publication

  •  Aralikatti, R., Boeddeker, C., Wichern, G., Subramanian, A.S., Le Roux, J., "Reverberation as Supervision for Speech Separation", arXiv, November 2022.
    BibTeX arXiv
    • @article{Aralikatti2022nov,
    • author = {Aralikatti, Rohith and Boeddeker, Christoph and Wichern, Gordon and Subramanian, Aswin Shanmugam and Le Roux, Jonathan},
    • title = {Reverberation as Supervision for Speech Separation},
    • journal = {arXiv},
    • year = 2022,
    • month = nov,
    • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.08303}
    • }