# Unifying Speech Enhancement and Separation with Gradient Modulation for End-to-End Noise-Robust Speech Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11131 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11131/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [SDR - half-baked or well done?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02508/) (2018)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Attention is All You Need in Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13154/) (2020)
- [Dual-path RNN: efficient long sequence modeling for time-domain single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06379/) (2019)
- [WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01160/) (2019)
- [LibriMix: An Open-Source Dataset for Generalizable Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11262/) (2020)
- [Multi-talker Speech Separation with Utterance-level Permutation Invariant Training of Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06284/) (2017)
- [Wavesplit: End-to-End Speech Separation by Speaker Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08933/) (2020)
- [An efficient encoder-decoder architecture with top-down attention for speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15200/) (2022)
- [Speech Separation Using an Asynchronous Fully Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02321/) (2021)
- [Noise-robust Speech Recognition with 10 Minutes Unparalleled In-domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15321/) (2022)
- [A Noise-Robust Self-supervised Pre-training Model Based Speech Representation Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08930/) (2022)
- [Robust Data2vec: Noise-robust Speech Representation Learning for ASR by Combining Regression and Improved Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15324/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Modality-specific Representations for Audio-visual Speech Recognition via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05301/) (2022)
- [Interactive Feature Fusion for End-to-End Noise-Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05267/) (2021)
- [Interactive Audio-text Representation for Automated Audio Captioning with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15526/) (2022)
- [The USTC-NELSLIP Systems for Simultaneous Speech Translation Task at IWSLT 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00279/) (2021)
- [On the Use of Deep Mask Estimation Module for Neural Source Separation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07347/) (2022)
- [Dual-Path Style Learning for End-to-End Noise-Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14838/) (2022)
- [Dual Application of Speech Enhancement for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03840/) (2020)
- [Joint Training of Speech Enhancement and Self-supervised Model for Noise-robust ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13293/) (2022)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06260/) (2022)
- [Speech-text based multi-modal training with bidirectional attention for improved speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00325/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Metric-oriented Speech Enhancement using Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11989/) (2023)
- [Wav2code: Restore Clean Speech Representations via Codebook Lookup for Noise-Robust ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04974/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Noise adaptation using Data Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11981/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Global Interaction and Local Alignment for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09212/) (2023)
- [Hearing Lips in Noise: Universal Viseme-Phoneme Mapping and Transfer for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10563/) (2023)
- [A Neural State-Space Model Approach to Efficient Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16932/) (2023)
- [MIR-GAN: Refining Frame-Level Modality-Invariant Representations with Adversarial Network for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10567/) (2023)
- [CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration -- A step towards Cross-lingual Transfer Beyond Textual Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12618/) (2024)
- [Geneses: Unified Generative Speech Enhancement and Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18456/) (2026)
- [Denoising-While-Completing Network (DWCNet): Robust Point Cloud Completion Under Corruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16743/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies in neural network-based monaural speech separation (SS) have achieved a remarkable success thanks to increasing ability of long sequence modeling. However, they would degrade significantly when put under realistic noisy conditions, as the background noise could be mistaken for speaker's speech and thus interfere with the separated sources. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel network to unify speech enhancement and separation with gradient modulation to improve noise-robustness. Specifically, we first build a unified network by combining speech enhancement (SE) and separation modules, with multi-task learning for optimization, where SE is supervised by parallel clean mixture to reduce noise for downstream speech separation. Furthermore, in order to avoid suppressing valid speaker information when reducing noise, we propose a gradient modulation (GM) strategy to harmonize the SE and SS tasks from optimization view. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art on large-scale Libri2Mix- and Libri3Mix-noisy datasets, with SI-SNRi results of 16.0 dB and 15.8 dB respectively. Our code is available at GitHub.