# Integrating Uncertainty into Neural Network-based Speech Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08744/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09457/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Deep Learning and a Probabilistic Perspective of Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08791/) (2020)
- [Deep Ensembles: A Loss Landscape Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02757/) (2019)
- [SDR - half-baked or well done?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02508/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.4102/) (2014)
- [Bayesian SegNet: Model Uncertainty in Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architectures for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02680/) (2015)
- [Supervised Speech Separation Based on Deep Learning: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07524/) (2017)
- [Improved Texture Networks: Maximizing Quality and Diversity in Feed-forward Stylization and Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02096/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Scalable Bayesian Deep Learning Methods for Robust Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01620/) (2019)
- [Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks with Bernoulli Approximate Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02158/) (2015)
- [Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07095/) (2018)
- [The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge: Datasets, Subjective Testing Framework, and Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13981/) (2020)
- [Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05256/) (2022)
- [On the Pitfalls of Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation with Probabilistic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09168/) (2022)
- [High-Quality Prediction Intervals for Deep Learning: A Distribution-Free, Ensembled Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07167/) (2018)
- [MetricGAN+: An Improved Version of MetricGAN for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03538/) (2021)
- [Speech Enhancement with Score-Based Generative Models in the Complex STFT Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17004/) (2022)
- [Reliable training and estimation of variance networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03260/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Speech Recognition via Uncertainty Driven Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13439/) (2020)
- [A Recurrent Variational Autoencoder for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10942/) (2019)
- [Statistical Speech Enhancement Based on Probabilistic Integration of Variational Autoencoder and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11439/) (2017)
- [A variance modeling framework based on variational autoencoders for speech enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01605/) (2019)
- [Variational Autoencoder for Speech Enhancement with a Noise-Aware Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08706/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Speech Enhancement using Dynamical Variational Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12271/) (2021)
- [Audio-visual Speech Enhancement Using Conditional Variational Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02590/) (2019)
- [ProbFlow: Joint Optical Flow and Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06509/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised masking approaches in the time-frequency domain aim to employ deep neural networks to estimate a multiplicative mask to extract clean speech. This leads to a single estimate for each input without any guarantees or measures of reliability. In this paper, we study the benefits of modeling uncertainty in clean speech estimation. Prediction uncertainty is typically categorized into aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. The former refers to inherent randomness in data, while the latter describes uncertainty in the model parameters. In this work, we propose a framework to jointly model aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties in neural network-based speech enhancement. The proposed approach captures aleatoric uncertainty by estimating the statistical moments of the speech posterior distribution and explicitly incorporates the uncertainty estimate to further improve clean speech estimation. For epistemic uncertainty, we investigate two Bayesian deep learning approaches: Monte Carlo dropout and Deep ensembles to quantify the uncertainty of the neural network parameters. Our analyses show that the proposed framework promotes capturing practical and reliable uncertainty, while combining different sources of uncertainties yields more reliable predictive uncertainty estimates. Furthermore, we demonstrate the benefits of modeling uncertainty on speech enhancement performance by evaluating the framework on different datasets, exhibiting notable improvement over comparable models that fail to account for uncertainty.