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Ye Ni

Publications and source records attributed to Ye Ni.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Echo-Aware Modulation for Compact-Latent Frequency-Time Modeling in Lightweight Acoustic Echo Cancellation

Existing lightweight acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) systems often combine linear AEC with Bark-domain DNN-based suppression to lower the computational footprint. In such systems, downsampling layers further compress the input features into a compact bottleneck representation, but this compression weakens frequency-time modeling capacity and degrades performance. To mitigate this limitation, we propose MSA-EchoLite, a lightweight Bark-domain AEC framework with an asymmetric dual-branch encoder and an echo-aware frequency-time modulation (EAM) module. The EAM module enriches the compressed bottleneck representation by modeling discrepancy and correlation cues between the dual-branch microphone and echo-related latent features. Experimental results show that the Bark-domain variant of MSA-EchoLite offers a better performance-complexity trade-off than its frequency-domain counterpart but is more sensitive to feature compression. With only 26.1% additional FLOPs over its non-EAM Bark-domain variant, its EAM-enhanced version achieves 99.1% of the PESQ of the frequency-domain counterpart, which requires nearly twice the FLOPs, and even surpasses it in SDR. Overall, MSA-EchoLite outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight AEC models while using only 0.2 M parameters and 100 M FLOPs/s.

eess.AS

Prosodic Boundary-Aware Streaming Generation for LLM-Based TTS with Streaming Text Input

Streaming TTS that receives streaming text is essential for interactive systems, yet this scheme faces two major challenges: unnatural prosody due to missing lookahead and long-form collapse due to unbounded context. We propose a prosodic-boundary-aware post-training strategy, adapting a pretrained LLM-based TTS model using weakly time-aligned data. Specifically, the model is adapted to learn early stopping at specified content boundaries when provided with limited future text. During inference, a sliding-window prompt carries forward previous text and speech tokens, ensuring bounded context and seamless concatenation. Evaluations show our method outperforms CosyVoice-Style interleaved baseline in both short and long-form scenarios. In long-text synthesis, especially, it achieves a 66.2% absolute reduction in word error rate (from 71.0% to 4.8%) and increases speaker and emotion similarity by 16.1% and 1.5% relatively, offering a robust solution for streaming TTS with incremental text.

cs.SD

GenTSE: Enhancing Target Speaker Extraction via a Coarse-to-Fine Generative Language Model

Language Model (LM)-based generative modeling has emerged as a promising direction for TSE, offering potential for improved generalization and high-fidelity speech. We propose GenTSE, a two-stage decoder-only generative LM for TSE: Stage-1 predicts coarse semantic tokens, and Stage-2 generates fine acoustic tokens. Separating semantics and acoustics stabilizes decoding and yields more accurate target speech. Both stages use continuous SSL or codec embeddings, offering richer context than discretized-prompt methods. To reduce exposure bias, we employ a Frozen-LM Conditioning training strategy that conditions the LMs on predicted tokens from earlier checkpoints to reduce the gap between teacher-forcing training and autoregressive inference. We further apply DPO to better align outputs with perceptual preferences. Experiments on Libri2Mix show that GenTSE surpasses previous LM-based systems in speech quality, intelligibility, and speaker consistency.

eess.AS

Affine Modulation-based Audiogram Fusion Network for Joint Noise Reduction and Hearing Loss Compensation

Hearing aids (HAs) are widely used to provide personalized speech enhancement (PSE) services, improving the quality of life for individuals with hearing loss. However, HA performance significantly declines in noisy environments as it treats noise reduction (NR) and hearing loss compensation (HLC) as separate tasks. This separation leads to a lack of systematic optimization, overlooking the interactions between these two critical tasks, and increases the system complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel audiogram fusion network, named AFN-HearNet, which simultaneously tackles the NR and HLC tasks by fusing cross-domain audiogram and spectrum features. We propose an audiogram-specific encoder that transforms the sparse audiogram profile into a deep representation, addressing the alignment problem of cross-domain features prior to fusion. To incorporate the interactions between NR and HLC tasks, we propose the affine modulation-based audiogram fusion frequency-temporal Conformer that adaptively fuses these two features into a unified deep representation for speech reconstruction. Furthermore, we introduce a voice activity detection auxiliary training task to embed speech and non-speech patterns into the unified deep representation implicitly. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets to validate the effectiveness of each proposed module. The results indicate that the AFN-HearNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art in-context fusion joint models regarding key metrics such as HASQI and PESQ, achieving a considerable trade-off between performance and efficiency. The source code and data will be released at https://github.com/deepnetni/AFN-HearNet.

eess.AS

Leveraging Local and Global Knowledge Integration with Time-Frequency Calibrated Distillation for Speech Enhancement

In this paper, we propose an intra-set and inter-set recursive fusion framework with time-frequency calibrated knowledge distillation (I$^2$SRF-TFCKD) for SE. Different from previous distillation strategies for SE, the proposed framework fully exploits the time-frequency differential information of speech while facilitating both local information focusing and global knowledge circulation. Firstly, we construct a collaborative distillation paradigm for intra-set and inter-set correlations. Within a correlated set, multi-layer teacher-student features are pairwise matched for calibrated distillation. Subsequently, we generate representative features from each correlated set through recursive fusion to form the fused feature set that enables inter-set knowledge interaction. Secondly, we propose a multi-layer interactive distillation based on dual-stream time-frequency cross-calibration, which calculates the teacher-student similarity calibration weights in the time and frequency domains respectively and performs cross-weighting, thus enabling refined allocation of distillation contributions across different layers according to speech characteristics. The proposed distillation strategy is applied to the dual-path dilated convolutional recurrent network (DPDCRN) that ranked first in the SE track of the L3DAS23 challenge. To evaluate the effectiveness of I$^2$SRF-TFCKD, we conduct experiments on both single-channel and multi-channel SE datasets. Objective evaluations demonstrate that the proposed KD strategy consistently and effectively improves the performance of the low-complexity student model and outperforms other distillation schemes.

cs.SD

Efficient Emotion and Speaker Adaptation in LLM-Based TTS via Characteristic-Specific Partial Fine-Tuning

While LLM-based TTS models exhibit zero-shot emotion and speaker cloning, their cloning fidelity and pronunciation clarity degrade on unseen domains. Fine-tuning is essential for adaptation, yet uniform approaches overlook specific parameter contributions. Uniform tuning on limited data causes slow training and catastrophic forgetting, leading to degraded pronunciation accuracy. To address this, we propose CSP-FT, a characteristic-specific partial fine-tuning strategy. By dynamically analyzing layer contributions via a weighted sum, we selectively fine-tune only the two layers capturing the most and least emotion and speaker information, maximizing the utility of the former while explicitly strengthening the capacity of the latter. Experiments on a combined corpus of 11 datasets show CSP-FT matches or exceeds the fidelity and intelligibility of full fine-tuning while updating only ~8% of parameters, accelerating training by ~2x, and significantly mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

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