2024/11/27 by Jia Qi Yip, Chin Yuen Kwok, Yip, Jia Qi +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Compression Techniques #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Electrical engineering #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.17998
openalex publication_date 2024/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Neural audio codecs have revolutionized audio processing by enabling speech tasks to be performed on highly compressed representations. Recent work has shown that speech separation can be achieved within these compressed domains, offering faster training and reduced inference costs. However, current approaches still rely on waveform-based loss functions, necessitating unnecessary decoding steps during training. We propose a novel embedding loss for neural audio codec-based speech separation that operates directly on compressed audio representations, eliminating the need for decoding during training. To validate our approach, we conduct comprehensive evaluations using both objective metrics and perceptual assessment techniques, including intrusive and non-intrusive methods. Our results demonstrate that embedding loss can be used to train codec-based speech separation models with a 2x improvement in training speed and computational cost while achieving better DNSMOS and STOI performance on the WSJ0-2mix dataset across 3 different pre-trained codecs.