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Main Authors: Li, Haoyang, Hou, Nana, Hu, Yuchen, Yao, Jixun, Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco, Zhuang, Xuyi, Ye, Deheng, Yang, Wei, Chng, Eng Siong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09929
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author Li, Haoyang
Hou, Nana
Hu, Yuchen
Yao, Jixun
Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco
Zhuang, Xuyi
Ye, Deheng
Yang, Wei
Chng, Eng Siong
author_facet Li, Haoyang
Hou, Nana
Hu, Yuchen
Yao, Jixun
Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco
Zhuang, Xuyi
Ye, Deheng
Yang, Wei
Chng, Eng Siong
contents Language Model (LM)-based speech enhancement (SE) has recently emerged as a promising direction, but existing approaches predominantly rely on token-level likelihood objectives that weakly reflect human perception. This mismatch limits progress, as optimizing signal accuracy does not always improve naturalness or listening comfort. We address this gap by introducing a perceptually aligned LM-based SE approach. Our method applies Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with UTMOS, a neural MOS predictor, as a proxy for human ratings, directly steering models toward perceptually preferred outputs. This design directly connects model training to perceptual quality and is broadly applicable within LM-based SE frameworks. On the Deep Noise Suppression Challenge 2020 test sets, our approach consistently improves speech quality metrics, achieving relative gains of up to 56%. To our knowledge, this is the first integration of perceptual feedback into LM-based SE and the first application of DPO in the SE domain, establishing a new paradigm for perceptually aligned enhancement with SE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_09929
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aligning Generative Speech Enhancement with Perceptual Feedback
Li, Haoyang
Hou, Nana
Hu, Yuchen
Yao, Jixun
Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco
Zhuang, Xuyi
Ye, Deheng
Yang, Wei
Chng, Eng Siong
Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Language Model (LM)-based speech enhancement (SE) has recently emerged as a promising direction, but existing approaches predominantly rely on token-level likelihood objectives that weakly reflect human perception. This mismatch limits progress, as optimizing signal accuracy does not always improve naturalness or listening comfort. We address this gap by introducing a perceptually aligned LM-based SE approach. Our method applies Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with UTMOS, a neural MOS predictor, as a proxy for human ratings, directly steering models toward perceptually preferred outputs. This design directly connects model training to perceptual quality and is broadly applicable within LM-based SE frameworks. On the Deep Noise Suppression Challenge 2020 test sets, our approach consistently improves speech quality metrics, achieving relative gains of up to 56%. To our knowledge, this is the first integration of perceptual feedback into LM-based SE and the first application of DPO in the SE domain, establishing a new paradigm for perceptually aligned enhancement with SE.
title Aligning Generative Speech Enhancement with Perceptual Feedback
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09929