# An Analysis of the Variance of Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00811/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 12 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Supervised Speech Separation Based on Deep Learning: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07524/) (2017)
- [Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation with Diffusion-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05830/) (2022)
- [Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05256/) (2022)
- [Speech Enhancement with Score-Based Generative Models in the Complex STFT Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17004/) (2022)
- [ICASSP 2022 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13288/) (2022)
- [A Study on Speech Enhancement Based on Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11876/) (2021)
- [Reducing the Prior Mismatch of Stochastic Differential Equations for Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14748/) (2023)
- [Variance-Preserving-Based Interpolation Diffusion Models for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08527/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Diffusion Buffer: Online Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement with Sub-Second Latency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02908/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Buffer for Online Generative Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18744/) (2025)
- [Audio Generation Through Score-Based Generative Modeling: Design Principles and Implementation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08457/) (2025)
- [Bone-conduction Guided Multimodal Speech Enhancement with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12354/) (2026)
- [StrixAE: An Intelligent Agent for Audio Enhancement under Complex Distortion Coupling in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03414/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models proved to be powerful models for generative speech enhancement. In recent SGMSE+ approaches, training involves a stochastic differential equation for the diffusion process, adding both Gaussian and environmental noise to the clean speech signal gradually. The speech enhancement performance varies depending on the choice of the stochastic differential equation that controls the evolution of the mean and the variance along the diffusion processes when adding environmental and Gaussian noise. In this work, we highlight that the scale of the variance is a dominant parameter for speech enhancement performance and show that it controls the tradeoff between noise attenuation and speech distortions. More concretely, we show that a larger variance increases the noise attenuation and allows for reducing the computational footprint, as fewer function evaluations for generating the estimate are required