# CHiME-9 ECHI: A Machine Learning Challenge for Enhancing Conversations to Address Hearing Impairment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26306/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00475/) (2020)
- [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)
- [EARS: An Anechoic Fullband Speech Dataset Benchmarked for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06185/) (2024)
- [TF-GridNet: Integrating Full- and Sub-Band Modeling for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12433/) (2022)
- [VERSA: A Versatile Evaluation Toolkit for Speech, Audio, and Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17667/) (2024)
- [Multi-Channel Target Speaker Extraction with Refinement: The WavLab Submission to the Second Clarity Enhancement Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07928/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents the task and results of the CHiME-9 challenge for Enhancing Conversations to address Hearing Impairment. The challenge considers the scenario of four-party conversations in a noisy, cafeteria-style environment with interfering speech sources and sound effects. Participants are provided with audio recordings made with Meta Aria glasses and hearing aid microphones, and clean speech samples of the conversation participants. The task is to extract the speech of the conversation partners from the noisy multi-channel recordings with the goal of improving the intelligibility and quality of the speech, evaluated using objective metrics and subjective listening tests. This paper reviews submissions from seven teams and ranks them on a combination of subjective intelligibility and quality. Results show that while the objective metrics do not reflect listener performance, the top systems were able to make substantial improvements over the challenge baseline in both intelligibility and quality ratings.