On Temporal Guidance and Iterative Refinement in Audio Source Separation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Morocutti, Tobias, Greif, Jonathan, Primus, Paul, Schmid, Florian, Widmer, Gerhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Morocutti, Tobias
Greif, Jonathan
Primus, Paul
Schmid, Florian
Widmer, Gerhard
author_facet Morocutti, Tobias
Greif, Jonathan
Primus, Paul
Schmid, Florian
Widmer, Gerhard
contents Spatial semantic segmentation of sound scenes (S5) involves the accurate identification of active sound classes and the precise separation of their sources from complex acoustic mixtures. Conventional systems rely on a two-stage pipeline - audio tagging followed by label-conditioned source separation - but are often constrained by the absence of fine-grained temporal information critical for effective separation. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel approach for S5 that enhances the synergy between the event detection and source separation stages. Our key contributions are threefold. First, we fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer to detect active sound classes. Second, we utilize a separate instance of this fine-tuned Transformer to perform sound event detection (SED), providing the separation module with detailed, time-varying guidance. Third, we implement an iterative refinement mechanism that progressively enhances separation quality by recursively reusing the separator's output from previous iterations. These advancements lead to significant improvements in both audio tagging and source separation performance, as demonstrated by our system's second-place finish in Task 4 of the DCASE Challenge 2025. Our implementation and model checkpoints are available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/theMoro/dcase25task4 .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17297
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Temporal Guidance and Iterative Refinement in Audio Source Separation
Morocutti, Tobias
Greif, Jonathan
Primus, Paul
Schmid, Florian
Widmer, Gerhard
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
Spatial semantic segmentation of sound scenes (S5) involves the accurate identification of active sound classes and the precise separation of their sources from complex acoustic mixtures. Conventional systems rely on a two-stage pipeline - audio tagging followed by label-conditioned source separation - but are often constrained by the absence of fine-grained temporal information critical for effective separation. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel approach for S5 that enhances the synergy between the event detection and source separation stages. Our key contributions are threefold. First, we fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer to detect active sound classes. Second, we utilize a separate instance of this fine-tuned Transformer to perform sound event detection (SED), providing the separation module with detailed, time-varying guidance. Third, we implement an iterative refinement mechanism that progressively enhances separation quality by recursively reusing the separator's output from previous iterations. These advancements lead to significant improvements in both audio tagging and source separation performance, as demonstrated by our system's second-place finish in Task 4 of the DCASE Challenge 2025. Our implementation and model checkpoints are available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/theMoro/dcase25task4 .
title On Temporal Guidance and Iterative Refinement in Audio Source Separation
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17297