arXiv subjects

Bang Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Bang Zeng.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Discriminative-Generative Target Speaker Extraction with Decoder-Only Language Models

Target speaker extraction (TSE) aims to recover the speech of a desired speaker from a mixture given a short enrollment utterance, while speech enhancement (SE) focuses on improving speech quality under noisy conditions. Most existing TSE and SE systems are based on discriminative modeling and have shown strong interference suppression ability, but they often remain limited in perceptual quality and naturalness. To address this issue, we first introduce LauraTSE, a generative TSE model built on an autoregressive decoder-only language model. Although generative modeling is promising for quality enhancement, purely generative TSE may suffer from hallucination, content drift, and limited controllability in complex acoustic conditions. We therefore propose a discriminative-generative two-stage framework, where a discriminative front-end first produces target-related representations with strong interference suppression, and a generative back-end then reconstructs high-quality speech in the neural audio codec representation space. This design combines the controllability of discriminative extraction with the reconstruction capability of generative modeling. We further investigate several collaboration strategies for the two-stage framework, including front-end freezing, joint fine-tuning, SI-SDR regularization, and autoregressive/non-autoregressive inference. Experimental results on both TSE and SE benchmarks show that the proposed framework achieves a better balance among perceptual quality, intelligibility, and speaker consistency than purely discriminative or purely generative baselines.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Robust Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction with Emotion-Aware Multiple Enrollment Fusion

Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction (AVTSE) is crucial for cocktail party scenarios. Leveraging multiple cues --such as utterance-level speaker embeddings or steady face images, and frame-level lip motion or facial expression features --can significantly improve performance. However, real-world applications often suffer from intermittent signal loss, especially for frame-level cues. This paper systematically investigates the robustness of multi-enrollment fusion under varying degrees of modality missing. Results show that while full multimodal fusion excels under ideal conditions, its performance degrades sharply when encountering unseen modalities missing during the testing. Crucially, training with a high missing rate dramatically enhances robustness, maintaining stable performance even under severe test-time modality missing. We demonstrate that fusing the complementary one frame of face image with frame-level lip features achieves both strong performance and robustness for the AVTSE task. The model and codes are shared.

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arXiv2025

LauraTSE: Target Speaker Extraction using Auto-Regressive Decoder-Only Language Models

We propose LauraTSE, an Auto-Regressive Decoder-Only Language Model for Target Speaker Extraction built upon the LauraGPT backbone. LauraTSE employs a small-scale auto-regressive decoder-only language model that generates the initial layers of the target speech's discrete codec representations from the continuous embeddings of both the mixture and reference speech. These outputs serve as coarse-grained predictions. To refine them, a one-step encoder-only language model reconstructs the full codec representation by integrating information from both the mixture and the reference speech, adding fine-grained details. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve promising performance. Additionally, we conduct ablation studies to investigate the data scalability and the contribution of the encoder-only model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Universal Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction and Personal Voice Activity Detection

Determining 'who spoke what and when' remains challenging in real-world applications. In typical scenarios, Speaker Diarization (SD) is employed to address the problem of 'who spoke when,' while Target Speaker Extraction (TSE) or Target Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition (TSASR) techniques are utilized to resolve the issue of 'who spoke what.' Although some works have achieved promising results by combining SD and TSE systems, inconsistencies remain between SD and TSE regarding both output inconsistency and scenario mismatch. To address these limitations, we propose a Universal Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction and Personal Voice Activity Detection (USEF-TP) model that jointly performs TSE and Personal Voice Activity Detection (PVAD). USEF-TP leverages frame-level features obtained through a cross-attention mechanism as speaker-related features instead of using speaker embeddings as in traditional approaches. Additionally, a multi-task learning algorithm with a scenario-aware differentiated loss function is applied to ensure robust performance across various levels of speaker overlap. The experimental results show that our proposed USEF-TP model achieves superior performance in TSE and PVAD tasks on the LibriMix and SparseLibriMix datasets. The results on the CALLHOME dataset demonstrate the competitive performance of our model on real recordings.

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arXiv2024

TSELM: Target Speaker Extraction using Discrete Tokens and Language Models

We propose TSELM, a novel target speaker extraction network that leverages discrete tokens and language models. TSELM utilizes multiple discretized layers from WavLM as input tokens and incorporates cross-attention mechanisms to integrate target speaker information. Language models are employed to capture the sequence dependencies, while a scalable HiFi-GAN is used to reconstruct the audio from the tokens. By applying a cross-entropy loss, TSELM models the probability distribution of output tokens, thus converting the complex regression problem of audio generation into a classification task. Experimental results show that TSELM achieves excellent results in speech quality and comparable results in speech intelligibility.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

USEF-TSE: Universal Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction

Target speaker extraction aims to separate the voice of a specific speaker from mixed speech. Traditionally, this process has relied on extracting a speaker embedding from a reference speech, in which a speaker recognition model is required. However, identifying an appropriate speaker recognition model can be challenging, and using the target speaker embedding as reference information may not be optimal for target speaker extraction tasks. This paper introduces a Universal Speaker Embedding-Free Target Speaker Extraction (USEF-TSE) framework that operates without relying on speaker embeddings. USEF-TSE utilizes a multi-head cross-attention mechanism as a frame-level target speaker feature extractor. This innovative approach allows mainstream speaker extraction solutions to bypass the dependency on speaker recognition models and better leverage the information available in the enrollment speech, including speaker characteristics and contextual details. Additionally, USEF-TSE can seamlessly integrate with other time-domain or time-frequency domain speech separation models to achieve effective speaker extraction. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of Scale-Invariant Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SI-SDR) on the WSJ0-2mix, WHAM!, and WHAMR! datasets, which are standard benchmarks for monaural anechoic, noisy and noisy-reverberant two-speaker speech separation and speaker extraction. The results on the LibriMix and the blind test set of the ICASSP 2023 DNS Challenge demonstrate that the model performs well on more diverse and out-of-domain data. For access to the source code, please visit: https://github.com/ZBang/USEF-TSE.

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arXiv2022

Simultaneous Speech Extraction for Multiple Target Speakers under the Meeting Scenarios

The common target speech separation directly estimate the target source, ignoring the interrelationship between different speakers at each frame. We propose a multiple-target speech separation model (MTSS) to simultaneously extract each speaker's voice from the mixed speech rather than just optimally estimating the target source. Moreover, we propose a speaker diarization (SD) aware MTSS system (SD-MTSS), which consists of a SD module and MTSS module. By exploiting the TSVAD decision and the estimated mask, our SD-MTSS model can extract the speech signal of each speaker concurrently in a conversational recording without additional enrollment audio in advance. Experimental results show that our MTSS model achieves 1.38dB SDR, 1.34dB SI-SDR, and 0.13 PESQ improvements over the baseline on the WSJ0-2mix-extr dataset, respectively. The SD-MTSS system makes 19.2% relative speaker dependent character error rate (CER) reduction on the Alimeeting dataset.

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