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In realistic speech enhancement settings for end-user devices, we often encounter only a few speakers and noise types that tend to reoccur in the specific acoustic environment. We propose a novel personalized speech enhancement method to adapt a compact denoising model to the test-time specificity. Our goal in this test-time adaptation is to utilize no clean speech target of the test speaker, thus fulfilling the requirement for zero-shot learning. To complement the lack of clean speech, we employ the knowledge distillation framework: we distill the more advanced denoising results from an overly large teacher model, and use them as the pseudo target to train the small student model. This zero-shot learning procedure circumvents the process of collecting users' clean speech, a process that users are reluctant to comply due to privacy concerns and technical difficulty of recording clean voice. Experiments on various test-time conditions show that the proposed personalization method can significantly improve the compact models' performance during the test time. Furthermore, since the personalized models outperform larger non-personalized baseline models, we claim that personalization achieves model compression with no loss of denoising performance. As expected, the student models underperform the state-of-the-art teacher models.
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Personalized Speech Enhancement Through Self-Supervised Data Augmentation and Purification
Training personalized speech enhancement models is innately a no-shot learning problem due to privacy constraints and limited access to noise-free speech from the target user. If there is an abundance of unlabeled noisy speech from the test-time user, one may train a personalized speech enhancement model using self-supervised learning. One straightforward approach to model personalization is to use the target speaker’s noisy recordings as pseudo-sources. Then, a pseudo denoising model learns to remove injected training noises and recover the pseudo-sources. However, this approach is volatile as it depends on the quality of the pseudo-sources, which may be too noisy. To remedy this, we propose a data purification step that refines the self-supervised approach. We first train an SNR predictor model to estimate the frame-by-frame SNR of the pseudo- sources. Then, we convert the predictor’s estimates into weights that adjust the pseudo-sources’ frame-by-frame contribution to- wards training the personalized model. We empirically show that the proposed data purification step improves the usability of the speaker-specific noisy data in the context of personalized speech enhancement. Our approach may be seen as privacy-preserving as it does not rely on any clean speech recordings or speaker embeddings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2046963
- PAR ID:
- 10318304
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Interspeech 2021
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1868
