Teacher-Student MixIT for Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Speech Separation
On the map: Knowledge distillation → Speech and audio distillation
Abstract (arXiv)
In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-supervised learning framework for end-to-end speech separation. The proposed method first uses mixtures of unseparated sources and the mixture invariant training (MixIT) criterion to train a teacher model. The teacher model then estimates separated sources that are used to train a student model with standard permutation invariant training (PIT). The student model can be fine-tuned with supervised data, i.e., paired artificial mixtures and clean speech sources, and further improved via model distillation. Experiments with single and multi channel mixtures show that the teacher-student training resolves the over-separation problem observed in the original MixIT method. Further, the semisupervised performance is comparable to a fully-supervised separation system trained using ten times the amount of supervised data.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Speech and audio distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation. Builds on 26 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2021.
Builds on
26 of 37 references.
References · 26
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14 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 4; 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 1.
9 papers.
- 2022Music Source Separation with Band-split RNNcited by 70
- 2022RemixIT: Continual self-training of speech enhancement models via bootstrapped remixingcited by 20
- 2023Subnetwork-to-go: Elastic Neural Network with Dynamic Training and Customizable Inferencecited by 9
- 2022MixCycle: Unsupervised Speech Separation via Cyclic Mixture Permutation Invariant Trainingcited by 7
- 2021Continual self-training with bootstrapped remixing for speech enhancementcited by 6
- 2022Deep neural network techniques for monaural speech enhancement: state of the art analysiscited by 3
- 2024Speech Separation with Pretrained Frontend to Minimize Domain Mismatchcited by 1
- 2023Speech Separation based on Contrastive Learning and Deep Modularizationcited by 0
- 2025DISPATCH: Distilling Selective Patches for Speech Enhancementcited by 0
- 2025DISPATCH: Distilling Selective Patches for Speech Enhancement19 Sep 2025
- 2024Speech Separation with Pretrained Frontend to Minimize Domain Mismatch5 Nov 2024
- 2023Subnetwork-to-go: Elastic Neural Network with Dynamic Training and Customizable Inference6 Dec 2023
- 2023Speech Separation based on Contrastive Learning and Deep Modularization18 May 2023
- 2022Deep neural network techniques for monaural speech enhancement: state of the art analysis1 Dec 2022
- 2022Music Source Separation with Band-split RNN30 Sep 2022
- 2022RemixIT: Continual self-training of speech enhancement models via bootstrapped remixing17 Feb 2022
- 2022MixCycle: Unsupervised Speech Separation via Cyclic Mixture Permutation Invariant Training8 Feb 2022
- 2021Continual self-training with bootstrapped remixing for speech enhancement19 Oct 2021
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2023A Teacher-Student approach for extracting informative speaker embeddings from speech mixtures
- 2022Ultra Fast Speech Separation Model with Teacher Student Learning
- 2023Separate And Diffuse: Using a Pretrained Diffusion Model for Improving Source Separation
- 2022Leveraging Real Conversational Data for Multi-Channel Continuous Speech Separation
- 2022Handling Trade-Offs in Speech Separation with Sparsely-Gated Mixture of Experts
- 2025Unsupervised Single-Channel Speech Separation with Diffusion under Speaker-Embedding Guidance
- 2025Training-Free Multi-Step Audio Source Separation
- 2026Unmixing The Crowd: Learning Persistent Speaker Representations from Mixture-Derived Multi-Speaker Embeddings ↗