# FlowSE: Efficient and High-Quality Speech Enhancement via Flow Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19476/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 29 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation with Diffusion-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05830/) (2022)
- [Real Time Speech Enhancement in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12847/) (2020)
- [WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01160/) (2019)
- [Vocos: Closing the gap between time-domain and Fourier-based neural vocoders for high-quality audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00814/) (2023)
- [E2 TTS: Embarrassingly Easy Fully Non-Autoregressive Zero-Shot TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18009/) (2024)
- [Matcha-TTS: A fast TTS architecture with conditional flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03199/) (2023)
- [DCCRN: Deep Complex Convolution Recurrent Network for Phase-Aware Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00264/) (2020)
- [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)
- [WeNet: Production oriented Streaming and Non-streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01547/) (2021)
- [StoRM: A Diffusion-based Stochastic Regeneration Model for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11851/) (2022)
- [Speech Enhancement with Score-Based Generative Models in the Complex STFT Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17004/) (2022)
- [Wespeaker: A Research and Production oriented Speaker Embedding Learning Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17016/) (2022)
- [TF-GridNet: Integrating Full- and Sub-Band Modeling for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12433/) (2022)
- [SELM: Speech Enhancement Using Discrete Tokens and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09747/) (2023)
- [MaskSR: Masked Language Model for Full-band Speech Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02092/) (2024)
- [FlowAVSE: Efficient Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement with Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09286/) (2024)
- [FlowSep: Language-Queried Sound Separation with Rectified Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07614/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Multi-Metric Preference Alignment for Generative Speech Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17229/) (2025)
- [PASE: Leveraging the Phonological Prior of WavLM for Low-Hallucination Generative Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13300/) (2025)
- [FlowSE-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Speech Enhancement via Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16483/) (2026)
- [UniFlow: Unifying Speech Front-End Tasks via Continuous Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07558/) (2025)
- [SenSE: Semantic-Aware High-Fidelity Universal Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24708/) (2025)
- [Speech Enhancement Based on Drifting Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24199/) (2026)
- [Shortcut Flow Matching for Speech Enhancement: Step-Invariant flows via single stage training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21522/) (2025)
- [Compose Yourself: Average-Velocity Flow Matching for One-Step Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15952/) (2025)
- [Investigating training objective for flow matching-based speech enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10382/) (2025)
- [ImmersiveFlow: Stereo-to-7.1.4 spatial audio generation with flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12950/) (2026)
- [CogSR: Semantic-Aware Speech Super-Resolution via Chain-of-Thought Guided Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16304/) (2025)
- [StuPASE: Towards Low-Hallucination Studio-Quality Generative Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09234/) (2026)
- [Mask2Flow-TSE: Two-Stage Target Speaker Extraction with Masking and Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12837/) (2026)
- [DiT-Flow: Speech Enhancement Robust to Multiple Distortions based on Flow Matching in Latent Space and Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21608/) (2026)
- [PhASE-Flow: Phonetic-Conditioned Acoustic Flow Matching in SSL Representation Domain for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17806/) (2026)
- [DriftSE: Speech Enhancement with Generative Drifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12252/) (2026)
- [Transcript-Supervised Post-Training of Generative Speech Enhancement on Real Recordings via Reinforce Adjoint Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29405/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models have excelled in audio tasks using approaches such as language models, diffusion, and flow matching. However, existing generative approaches for speech enhancement (SE) face notable challenges: language model-based methods suffer from quantization loss, leading to compromised speaker similarity and intelligibility, while diffusion models require complex training and high inference latency. To address these challenges, we propose FlowSE, a flow-matching-based model for SE. Flow matching learns a continuous transformation between noisy and clean speech distributions in a single pass, significantly reducing inference latency while maintaining high-quality reconstruction. Specifically, FlowSE trains on noisy mel spectrograms and optional character sequences, optimizing a conditional flow matching loss with ground-truth mel spectrograms as supervision. It implicitly learns speech's temporal-spectral structure and text-speech alignment. During inference, FlowSE can operate with or without textual information, achieving impressive results in both scenarios, with further improvements when transcripts are available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowSE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative methods, establishing a new paradigm for generative-based SE and demonstrating the potential of flow matching to advance the field. Our code, pre-trained checkpoints, and audio samples are available.