URGENT Challenge: Universality, Robustness, and Generalizability For Speech Enhancement

The last decade has witnessed significant advancements in deep learning-based speech enhancement (SE). However, most existing SE research has limitations on the coverage of SE sub-tasks, data diversity and amount, and evaluation metrics. To fill this gap and promote research toward universal SE, we establish a new SE challenge, named URGENT, to focus on the universality, robustness, and generalizability of SE. We aim to extend the SE definition to cover different sub-tasks to explore the limits of SE models, starting from denoising, dereverberation, bandwidth extension, and declipping. A novel framework is proposed to unify all these sub-tasks in a single model, allowing the use of all existing SE approaches. We collected public speech and noise data from different domains to construct diverse evaluation data. Finally, we discuss the insights gained from our preliminary baseline experiments based on both generative and discriminative SE methods with 12 curated metrics.

Beyond Performance Plateaus: A Comprehensive Study on Scalability in Speech Enhancement

Deep learning-based speech enhancement (SE) models have achieved impressive performance in the past decade. Numerous advanced architectures have been designed to deliver state-of-the-art performance; however, their scalability potential remains unrevealed. Meanwhile, the majority of research focuses on small-sized datasets with restricted diversity, leading to a plateau in performance improvement. In this paper, we aim to provide new insights for addressing the above issues by exploring the scalability of SE models in terms of architectures, model sizes, compute budgets, and dataset sizes. Our investigation involves several popular SE architectures and speech data from different domains. Experiments reveal both similarities and distinctions between the scaling effects in SE and other tasks such as speech recognition. These findings further provide insights into the under-explored SE directions, e.g., larger-scale multi-domain corpora and efficiently scalable architectures.

SpeechComposer: Unifying Multiple Speech Tasks with Prompt Composition

Recent advancements in language models have significantly enhanced performance in multiple speech-related tasks. Existing speech language models typically utilize task-dependent prompt tokens to unify various speech tasks in a single model. However, this design omits the intrinsic connections between different speech tasks, which can potentially boost the performance of each task. In this work, we propose a novel decoder-only speech language model, SpeechComposer, that can unify common speech tasks by composing a fixed set of prompt tokens. Built upon four primary tasks -- speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech language modeling, and text language modeling -- SpeechComposer can easily extend to more speech tasks via compositions of well-designed prompt tokens, like voice conversion and speech enhancement. The unification of prompt tokens also makes it possible for knowledge sharing among different speech tasks in a more structured manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SpeechComposer can improve the performance of both primary tasks and composite tasks, showing the effectiveness of the shared prompt tokens. Remarkably, the unified decoder-only model achieves a comparable and even better performance than the baselines which are expert models designed for single tasks.

ESPnet-SPK: full pipeline speaker embedding toolkit with reproducible recipes, self-supervised front-ends, and off-the-shelf models

This paper introduces ESPnet-SPK, a toolkit designed with several objectives for training speaker embedding extractors. First, we provide an open-source platform for researchers in the speaker recognition community to effortlessly build models. We provide several models, ranging from x-vector to recent SKA-TDNN. Through the modularized architecture design, variants can be developed easily. We also aspire to bridge developed models with other domains, facilitating the broad research community to effortlessly incorporate state-of-the-art embedding extractors. Pre-trained embedding extractors can be accessed in an off-the-shelf manner and we demonstrate the toolkit's versatility by showcasing its integration with two tasks. Another goal is to integrate with diverse self-supervised learning features. We release a reproducible recipe that achieves an equal error rate of 0.39% on the Vox1-O evaluation protocol using WavLM-Large with ECAPA-TDNN.

Improving Design of Input Condition Invariant Speech Enhancement

Building a single universal speech enhancement (SE) system that can handle arbitrary input is a demanded but underexplored research topic. Towards this ultimate goal, one direction is to build a single model that handles diverse audio duration, sampling frequencies, and microphone variations in noisy and reverberant scenarios, which we define here as "input condition invariant SE". Such a model was recently proposed showing promising performance; however, its multi-channel performance degraded severely in real conditions. In this paper we propose novel architectures to improve the input condition invariant SE model so that performance in simulated conditions remains competitive while real condition degradation is much mitigated. For this purpose, we redesign the key components that comprise such a system. First, we identify that the channel-modeling module's generalization to unseen scenarios can be sub-optimal and redesign this module. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to enhance training efficiency. Second, we propose two novel dual-path time-frequency blocks, demonstrating superior performance with fewer parameters and computational costs compared to the existing method. All proposals combined, experiments on various public datasets validate the efficacy of the proposed model, with significantly improved performance on real conditions. Recipe with full model details is released at https://github.com/espnet/espnet.

A Single Speech Enhancement Model Unifying Dereverberation, Denoising, Speaker Counting, Separation, and Extraction

We propose a multi-task universal speech enhancement (MUSE) model that can perform five speech enhancement (SE) tasks: dereverberation, denoising, speech separation (SS), target speaker extraction (TSE), and speaker counting. This is achieved by integrating two modules into an SE model: 1) an internal separation module that does both speaker counting and separation; and 2) a TSE module that extracts the target speech from the internal separation outputs using target speaker cues. The model is trained to perform TSE if the target speaker cue is given and SS otherwise. By training the model to remove noise and reverberation, we allow the model to tackle the five tasks mentioned above with a single model, which has not been accomplished yet. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed MUSE model can successfully handle multiple tasks with a single model.

Reproducing Whisper-Style Training Using an Open-Source Toolkit and Publicly Available Data

Pre-training speech models on large volumes of data has achieved remarkable success. OpenAI Whisper is a multilingual multitask model trained on 680k hours of supervised speech data. It generalizes well to various speech recognition and translation benchmarks even in a zero-shot setup. However, the full pipeline for developing such models (from data collection to training) is not publicly accessible, which makes it difficult for researchers to further improve its performance and address training-related issues such as efficiency, robustness, fairness, and bias. This work presents an Open Whisper-style Speech Model (OWSM), which reproduces Whisper-style training using an open-source toolkit and publicly available data. OWSM even supports more translation directions and can be more efficient to train. We will publicly release all scripts used for data preparation, training, inference, and scoring as well as pre-trained models and training logs to promote open science.

Toward Universal Speech Enhancement for Diverse Input Conditions

The past decade has witnessed substantial growth of data-driven speech enhancement (SE) techniques thanks to deep learning. While existing approaches have shown impressive performance in some common datasets, most of them are designed only for a single condition (e.g., single-channel, multi-channel, or a fixed sampling frequency) or only consider a single task (e.g., denoising or dereverberation). Currently, there is no universal SE approach that can effectively handle diverse input conditions with a single model. In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate this line of research. First, we devise a single SE model that is independent of microphone channels, signal lengths, and sampling frequencies. Second, we design a universal SE benchmark by combining existing public corpora with multiple conditions. Our experiments on a wide range of datasets show that the proposed single model can successfully handle diverse conditions with strong performance.

Joint Prediction and Denoising for Large-scale Multilingual Self-supervised Learning

Multilingual self-supervised learning (SSL) has often lagged behind state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods due to the expenses and complexity required to handle many languages. This further harms the reproducibility of SSL, which is already limited to few research groups due to its resource usage. We show that more powerful techniques can actually lead to more efficient pre-training, opening SSL to more research groups. We propose WavLabLM, which extends WavLM's joint prediction and denoising to 40k hours of data across 136 languages. To build WavLabLM, we devise a novel multi-stage pre-training method, designed to address the language imbalance of multilingual data. WavLabLM achieves comparable performance to XLS-R on ML-SUPERB with less than 10% of the training data, making SSL realizable with academic compute. We show that further efficiency can be achieved with a vanilla HuBERT Base model, which can maintain 94% of XLS-R's performance with only 3% of the data, 4 GPUs, and limited trials. We open-source all code and models in ESPnet.

Exploring the Integration of Speech Separation and Recognition with Self-Supervised Learning Representation

Neural speech separation has made remarkable progress and its integration with automatic speech recognition (ASR) is an important direction towards realizing multi-speaker ASR. This work provides an insightful investigation of speech separation in reverberant and noisy-reverberant scenarios as an ASR front-end. In detail, we explore multi-channel separation methods, mask-based beamforming and complex spectral mapping, as well as the best features to use in the ASR back-end model. We employ the recent self-supervised learning representation (SSLR) as a feature and improve the recognition performance from the case with filterbank features. To further improve multi-speaker recognition performance, we present a carefully designed training strategy for integrating speech separation and recognition with SSLR. The proposed integration using TF-GridNet-based complex spectral mapping and WavLM-based SSLR achieves a 2.5% word error rate in reverberant WHAMR! test set, significantly outperforming an existing mask-based MVDR beamforming and filterbank integration (28.9%).