MeCo: One-Step MeanFlow-based Corrector for Multi-Channel Speech Separation

While discriminative models for multi-channel speech separation excel in reference-based metrics, they often exhibit suboptimal human listening quality. To address this, we propose a novel MeanFlow-based one-step generative corrector (MeCo). MeCo learns a conditional average velocity field to map discriminative estimates directly onto the clean speech manifold in a single step. To maximize one-step generation performance, we introduce Data-Space Optimization (DSO). DSO integrates an $\mathbf{x}_r$-loss, which penalizes prediction errors on longer displacement intervals to serve as a generative objective for human listening quality, with an Endpoint SI-SDR loss that directly optimizes terminal signal fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that MeCo achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with minimal computational overhead, simultaneously achieving superior signal fidelity and human listening quality in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.

DISPATCH: Distilling Selective Patches for Speech Enhancement

In speech enhancement, knowledge distillation (KD) compresses models by transferring a high-capacity teacher's knowledge to a compact student. However, conventional KD methods train the student to mimic the teacher's output entirely, which forces the student to imitate the regions where the teacher performs poorly and to apply distillation to the regions where the student already performs well, which yields only marginal gains. We propose Distilling Selective Patches (DISPatch), a KD framework for speech enhancement that applies the distillation loss to spectrogram patches where the teacher outperforms the student, as determined by a Knowledge Gap Score. This approach guides optimization toward areas with the most significant potential for student improvement while minimizing the influence of regions where the teacher may provide unreliable instruction. Furthermore, we introduce Multi-Scale Selective Patches (MSSP), a frequency-dependent method that uses different patch sizes across low- and high-frequency bands to account for spectral heterogeneity. We incorporate DISPatch into conventional KD methods and observe consistent gains in compact students. Moreover, integrating DISPatch and MSSP into a state-of-the-art frequency-dependent KD method considerably improves performance across all metrics.