# RTFS-Net: Recurrent Time-Frequency Modelling for Efficient Audio-Visual Speech Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [Deep Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02108/) (2018)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Deep clustering: Discriminative embeddings for segmentation and separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04306/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04237/) (2020)
- [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)
- [TasNet: time-domain audio separation network for real-time, single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00541/) (2017)
- [VisualVoice: Audio-Visual Speech Separation with Cross-Modal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03149/) (2021)
- [The Conversation: Deep Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04121/) (2018)
- [Music Source Separation with Band-split RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15174/) (2022)
- [Dual-Path Transformer Network: Direct Context-Aware Modeling for End-to-End Monaural Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13975/) (2020)
- [Simple Recurrent Units for Highly Parallelizable Recurrence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02755/) (2017)
- [TF-GridNet: Making Time-Frequency Domain Models Great Again for Monaural Speaker Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03952/) (2022)
- [An efficient encoder-decoder architecture with top-down attention for speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15200/) (2022)
- [The Right to Talk: An Audio-Visual Transformer Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03256/) (2021)
- [Speech Separation Using an Asynchronous Fully Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02321/) (2021)
- [Time Domain Audio Visual Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03760/) (2019)
- [Looking into Your Speech: Learning Cross-modal Affinity for Audio-visual Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02775/) (2021)
- [FaSNet: Low-latency Adaptive Beamforming for Multi-microphone Audio Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13387/) (2019)
- [AV-SepFormer: Cross-Attention SepFormer for Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14170/) (2023)
- [An Audio-Visual Speech Separation Model Inspired by Cortico-Thalamo-Cortical Circuits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10744/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Speech Separation in Noisy Environments with a Lightweight Iterative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00160/) (2023)

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

- [Efficient Audio-Visual Speech Separation with Discrete Lip Semantics and Multi-Scale Global-Local Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23610/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Power of Natural Audio Featuring Multiple Sound Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17782/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual speech separation methods aim to integrate different modalities to generate high-quality separated speech, thereby enhancing the performance of downstream tasks such as speech recognition. Most existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models operate in the time domain. However, their overly simplistic approach to modeling acoustic features often necessitates larger and more computationally intensive models in order to achieve SOTA performance. In this paper, we present a novel time-frequency domain audio-visual speech separation method: Recurrent Time-Frequency Separation Network (RTFS-Net), which applies its algorithms on the complex time-frequency bins yielded by the Short-Time Fourier Transform. We model and capture the time and frequency dimensions of the audio independently using a multi-layered RNN along each dimension. Furthermore, we introduce a unique attention-based fusion technique for the efficient integration of audio and visual information, and a new mask separation approach that takes advantage of the intrinsic spectral nature of the acoustic features for a clearer separation. RTFS-Net outperforms the prior SOTA method in both inference speed and separation quality while reducing the number of parameters by 90% and MACs by 83%. This is the first time-frequency domain audio-visual speech separation method to outperform all contemporary time-domain counterparts.