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arXiv · 2606.18611

QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement

Abstract

We propose a parameter-efficient speech enhancement framework, Quaternion Conformer GAN (QC-GAN), which combines a Quaternion Conformer generator with MetricGAN-based training. The Hamilton product encodes the magnitude and phase via structured weight sharing, reducing the number of layer parameters while preserving their interdependencies. A metric-learning discriminator was employed to maximize perceptual quality by optimizing the approximate perceptual evaluation scores. On the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset, QC-GAN achieved a Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score of 3.48 with only 0.89M parameters, delivering a performance comparable to state-of-the-art models at less than half their size. A 35K-parameter variant achieved a PESQ score of 3.23, surpassing conventional methods with significantly fewer parameters. Evaluation on the DNS-Challenge 3 dataset further confirmed generalization to real-world conditions.

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BibTeXRIS

Shogo Yamauchi, Hideaki Tamori, Makoto Sakai, Yosuke Yamano, Tohru Nitta. 2026-06-17. QC-GAN: A Parameter-Efficient Quaternion Conformer GAN for High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18611

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