# On Data Sampling Strategies for Training Neural Network Speech Separation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07142 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07142/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The fifth 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge: Dataset, task and baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10609/) (2018)
- [Wavesplit: End-to-End Speech Separation by Speaker Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08933/) (2020)
- [WHAMR!: Noisy and Reverberant Single-Channel Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10279/) (2019)
- [Single-Channel Multi-Speaker Separation using Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02173/) (2016)
- [Integration of speech separation, diarization, and recognition for multi-speaker meetings: System description, comparison, and analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02014/) (2020)
- [Far-Field Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09395/) (2020)
- [Monaural source separation: From anechoic to reverberant environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07578/) (2021)
- [Receptive Field Analysis of Temporal Convolutional Networks for Monaural Speech Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06439/) (2022)
- [Deformable Temporal Convolutional Networks for Monaural Noisy Reverberant Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15305/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [On Time Domain Conformer Models for Monaural Speech Separation in Noisy Reverberant Acoustic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06125/) (2023)
- [Transcription-Free Fine-Tuning of Speech Separation Models for Noisy and Reverberant Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08914/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech separation remains an important area of multi-speaker signal processing. Deep neural network (DNN) models have attained the best performance on many speech separation benchmarks. Some of these models can take significant time to train and have high memory requirements. Previous work has proposed shortening training examples to address these issues but the impact of this on model performance is not yet well understood. In this work, the impact of applying these training signal length (TSL) limits is analysed for two speech separation models: SepFormer, a transformer model, and Conv-TasNet, a convolutional model. The WJS0-2Mix, WHAMR and Libri2Mix datasets are analysed in terms of signal length distribution and its impact on training efficiency. It is demonstrated that, for specific distributions, applying specific TSL limits results in better performance. This is shown to be mainly due to randomly sampling the start index of the waveforms resulting in more unique examples for training. A SepFormer model trained using a TSL limit of 4.42s and dynamic mixing (DM) is shown to match the best-performing SepFormer model trained with DM and unlimited signal lengths. Furthermore, the 4.42s TSL limit results in a 44% reduction in training time with WHAMR.