Exploring Length Generalization For Transformer-based Speech Enhancement

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Qiquan, Zhu, Hongxu, Qian, Xinyuan, Ambikairajah, Eliathamby, Li, Haizhou
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Qiquan
Zhu, Hongxu
Qian, Xinyuan
Ambikairajah, Eliathamby
Li, Haizhou
author_facet Zhang, Qiquan
Zhu, Hongxu
Qian, Xinyuan
Ambikairajah, Eliathamby
Li, Haizhou
contents Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios, speech enhancement models are often required to perform on noisy speech at run-time that is substantially longer than the training utterances. It remains a challenge how a Transformer-based speech enhancement model can generalize to long speech utterances. In this paper, extensive empirical studies are conducted to explore the model's length generalization ability. In particular, we conduct speech enhancement experiments on four training objectives and evaluate with five metrics. Our studies establish that positional encoding is an effective instrument to dampen the effect of utterance length on speech enhancement. We first explore several existing positional encoding methods, and the results show that relative positional encoding methods exhibit a better length generalization property than absolute positional encoding methods. Additionally, we also explore a simpler and more effective positional encoding scheme, i.e. LearnLin, that uses only one trainable parameter for each attention head to scale the real relative position between time frames, which learns the different preferences on short- or long-term dependencies of these heads. The results demonstrate that our proposal exhibits excellent length generalization ability with comparable or superior performance than other state-of-the-art positional encoding strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06697
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Length Generalization For Transformer-based Speech Enhancement
Zhang, Qiquan
Zhu, Hongxu
Qian, Xinyuan
Ambikairajah, Eliathamby
Li, Haizhou
Audio and Speech Processing
Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios, speech enhancement models are often required to perform on noisy speech at run-time that is substantially longer than the training utterances. It remains a challenge how a Transformer-based speech enhancement model can generalize to long speech utterances. In this paper, extensive empirical studies are conducted to explore the model's length generalization ability. In particular, we conduct speech enhancement experiments on four training objectives and evaluate with five metrics. Our studies establish that positional encoding is an effective instrument to dampen the effect of utterance length on speech enhancement. We first explore several existing positional encoding methods, and the results show that relative positional encoding methods exhibit a better length generalization property than absolute positional encoding methods. Additionally, we also explore a simpler and more effective positional encoding scheme, i.e. LearnLin, that uses only one trainable parameter for each attention head to scale the real relative position between time frames, which learns the different preferences on short- or long-term dependencies of these heads. The results demonstrate that our proposal exhibits excellent length generalization ability with comparable or superior performance than other state-of-the-art positional encoding strategies.
title Exploring Length Generalization For Transformer-based Speech Enhancement
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06697