# DAT-CFTNet: Speech Enhancement for Cochlear Implant Recipients using Attention-based Dual-Path Recurrent Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06744/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 19 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Speech enhancement and noise suppression, one of 11 directions in Speech and audio language models.
- Builds on 8 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Speech and audio language models / [Speech enhancement and noise suppression](https://mlsanity.com/speech/speech-enhancement-and-noise-suppression/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DCCRN: Deep Complex Convolution Recurrent Network for Phase-Aware Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00264/) (2020)
- [Dual-path RNN: efficient long sequence modeling for time-domain single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06379/) (2019)
- [A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07132/) (2016)
- [DPCRN: Dual-Path Convolution Recurrent Network for Single Channel Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05429/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Neural Network-based Speech Enhancement for Cochlear Implant Recipients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02526/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Cochlear Implant Users' Ability for Speaker Identification using CI Auditory Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00031/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The human auditory system has the ability to selectively focus on key speech elements in an audio stream while giving secondary attention to less relevant areas such as noise or distortion within the background, dynamically adjusting its attention over time. Inspired by the recent success of attention models, this study introduces a dual-path attention module in the bottleneck layer of a concurrent speech enhancement network. Our study proposes an attention-based dual-path RNN (DAT-RNN), which, when combined with the modified complex-valued frequency transformation network (CFTNet), forms the DAT-CFTNet. This attention mechanism allows for precise differentiation between speech and noise in time-frequency (T-F) regions of spectrograms, optimizing both local and global context information processing in the CFTNet. Our experiments suggest that the DAT-CFTNet leads to consistently improved performance over the existing models, including CFTNet and DCCRN, in terms of speech intelligibility and quality. Moreover, the proposed model exhibits superior performance in enhancing speech intelligibility for cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who are known to have severely limited T-F hearing restoration (e.g., >10%) in CI listener studies in noisy settings show the proposed solution is capable of suppressing non-stationary noise, avoiding the musical artifacts often seen in traditional speech enhancement methods. The implementation of the proposed model will be publicly available.