# SPGM: Prioritizing Local Features for enhanced speech separation performance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Audio Codec-based Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12434/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dual-path is a popular architecture for speech separation models (e.g. Sepformer) which splits long sequences into overlapping chunks for its intra- and inter-blocks that separately model intra-chunk local features and inter-chunk global relationships. However, it has been found that inter-blocks, which comprise half a dual-path model's parameters, contribute minimally to performance. Thus, we propose the Single-Path Global Modulation (SPGM) block to replace inter-blocks. SPGM is named after its structure consisting of a parameter-free global pooling module followed by a modulation module comprising only 2% of the model's total parameters. The SPGM block allows all transformer layers in the model to be dedicated to local feature modelling, making the overall model single-path. SPGM achieves 22.1 dB SI-SDRi on WSJ0-2Mix and 20.4 dB SI-SDRi on Libri2Mix, exceeding the performance of Sepformer by 0.5 dB and 0.3 dB respectively and matches the performance of recent SOTA models with up to 8 times fewer parameters. Model and weights are available at huggingface.co/yipjiaqi/spgm