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arXiv · 2610.07047

SEAL: Mixture-Closed Additive Reconstruction and Refinement-Aware Expert Routing for Efficient Speech Separation

Shao-Chun Hu·Zi-Xiang Lin·Jeih-Weih Hung·Hung-Shin Lee
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Abstract

Compact time-frequency separators that mask the mixture and refine through a shared cell face two limits. First, a bounded multiplicative mask only scales a mixture bin, so where overlapping components cancel, the estimate stays small. Second, a shared cell applies the same weights to every time-frequency token at every step, so enlarging it adds compute everywhere. We present SEAL (Sparse Expert routing with Additive Latent reconstruction) to address both. For reconstruction, a zero-sum additive residual bounded by the local mixture amplitude lets estimates be nonzero where components cancel yet still sum to the mixture. For routing, a query built from acoustic and inter-step evidence sends each token to one of six residual experts, and a norm cap keeps the step cue from overriding clear acoustic evidence. On EchoSet, SEAL (small) surpasses TIGER (small) by 0.31 dB SI-SDRi with 28% fewer parameters and 2.9 times fewer MACs, and SEAL (large) is within 0.07 dB SI-SDRi of TIGER (large) at 3.1 times fewer MACs.

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Shao-Chun Hu, Zi-Xiang Lin, Jeih-Weih Hung, Hung-Shin Lee. 2026-10-05. SEAL: Mixture-Closed Additive Reconstruction and Refinement-Aware Expert Routing for Efficient Speech Separation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07047

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