# EARS: An Anechoic Fullband Speech Dataset Benchmarked for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

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

- [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)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [DNSMOS: A Non-Intrusive Perceptual Objective Speech Quality metric to evaluate Noise Suppressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15258/) (2020)
- [NeMo: a toolkit for building AI applications using Neural Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09577/) (2019)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Neural Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15561/) (2021)
- [WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01160/) (2019)
- [Hybrid Transformers for Music Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08553/) (2022)
- [Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05256/) (2022)
- [ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11510/) (2023)
- [Analysing Diffusion-based Generative Approaches versus Discriminative Approaches for Speech Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02397/) (2022)
- [ICASSP 2024 Speech Signal Improvement Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14444/) (2024)
- [dEchorate: a Calibrated Room Impulse Response Database for Echo-aware Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13168/) (2021)
- [Multi-dimensional Speech Quality Assessment in Crowdsourcing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07385/) (2023)
- [BRUDEX Database: Binaural Room Impulse Responses with Uniformly Distributed External Microphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08484/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Scaling Rich Style-Prompted Text-to-Speech Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04713/) (2025)
- [FlowDec: A flow-based full-band general audio codec with high perceptual quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01485/) (2025)
- [CapSpeech: Enabling Downstream Applications in Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02863/) (2025)
- [AV-Flow: Transforming Text to Audio-Visual Human-like Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13133/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Bias in Spoken Dialogue LLMs for Real-World Decisions and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02352/) (2025)
- [DiTSE: High-Fidelity Generative Speech Enhancement via Latent Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09381/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Buffer: Online Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement with Sub-Second Latency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02908/) (2025)
- [SVeritas: Benchmark for Robust Speaker Verification under Diverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17091/) (2025)
- [CoLMbo: Speaker Language Model for Descriptive Profiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09375/) (2025)
- [FlowSE-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Speech Enhancement via Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16483/) (2026)
- [A Study of the Scale Invariant Signal to Distortion Ratio in Speech Separation with Noisy References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14623/) (2025)
- [VoiceBridge: General Speech Restoration with One-step Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25275/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Audio-language Pretraining for Learning General-purpose Audio Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16757/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Streamable Generative Speech Restoration with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19442/) (2025)
- [UniverSR: Unified and Versatile Audio Super-Resolution via Vocoder-Free Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00771/) (2025)
- [Chatterbox-Flash: Prior-Calibrated Block Diffusion for Streaming Zero-Shot TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30748/) (2026)
- [CleanMel: Mel-Spectrogram Enhancement for Improving Both Speech Quality and ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20040/) (2025)
- [SupertonicTTS: Towards Highly Efficient and Streamlined Text-to-Speech System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23108/) (2025)
- [LipDiffuser: Lip-to-Speech Generation with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11391/) (2025)
- [MambAttention: Mamba with Multi-Head Attention for Generalizable Single-Channel Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00966/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Buffer for Online Generative Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18744/) (2025)
- [Few-shot Acoustic Synthesis with Multimodal Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19176/) (2026)
- [JASTIN: Aligning LLMs for Zero-Shot Audio and Speech Evaluation via Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04505/) (2026)
- [Non-intrusive Speech Quality Assessment with Diffusion Models Trained on Clean Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17834/) (2024)
- [MARS6: A Small and Robust Hierarchical-Codec Text-to-Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05787/) (2025)
- [Real-Time Streaming Mel Vocoding with Generative Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15085/) (2025)
- [Are Modern Speech Enhancement Systems Vulnerable to Adversarial Attacks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21087/) (2025)
- [DELULU: Discriminative Embedding Learning Using Latent Units for Speaker-Aware Self-Trained Speech Foundational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17662/) (2025)
- [What and When to Learn: CURriculum Ranking Loss for Large-Scale Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24432/) (2026)
- [KVAE: Family of Tokenizers for Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We release the EARS (Expressive Anechoic Recordings of Speech) dataset, a high-quality speech dataset comprising 107 speakers from diverse backgrounds, totaling in 100 hours of clean, anechoic speech data. The dataset covers a large range of different speaking styles, including emotional speech, different reading styles, non-verbal sounds, and conversational freeform speech. We benchmark various methods for speech enhancement and dereverberation on the dataset and evaluate their performance through a set of instrumental metrics. In addition, we conduct a listening test with 20 participants for the speech enhancement task, where a generative method is preferred. We introduce a blind test set that allows for automatic online evaluation of uploaded data. Dataset download links and automatic evaluation server can be found online.