UniFlow: Unifying Speech Front-End Tasks via Continuous Generative Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Ziqian, Liu, Zikai, Zhu, Yike, Li, Xingchen, Kang, Boyi, Yao, Jixun, Xia, Xianjun, Huang, Chuanzeng, Xie, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Ziqian
Liu, Zikai
Zhu, Yike
Li, Xingchen
Kang, Boyi
Yao, Jixun
Xia, Xianjun
Huang, Chuanzeng
Xie, Lei
author_facet Wang, Ziqian
Liu, Zikai
Zhu, Yike
Li, Xingchen
Kang, Boyi
Yao, Jixun
Xia, Xianjun
Huang, Chuanzeng
Xie, Lei
contents Generative modeling has recently achieved remarkable success across image, video, and audio domains, demonstrating powerful capabilities for unified representation learning. Yet speech front-end tasks such as speech enhancement (SE), target speaker extraction (TSE), acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), and language-queried source separation (LASS) remain largely tackled by disparate, task-specific solutions. This fragmentation leads to redundant engineering effort, inconsistent performance, and limited extensibility. To address this gap, we introduce UniFlow, a unified framework that employs continuous generative modeling to tackle diverse speech front-end tasks in a shared latent space. Specifically, UniFlow utilizes a waveform variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn a compact latent representation of raw audio, coupled with a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that predicts latent updates. To differentiate the speech processing task during the training, learnable condition embeddings indexed by a task ID are employed to enable maximal parameter sharing while preserving task-specific adaptability. To balance model performance and computational efficiency, we investigate and compare three generative objectives: denoising diffusion, flow matching, and mean flow within the latent domain. We validate UniFlow on multiple public benchmarks, demonstrating consistent gains over state-of-the-art baselines. UniFlow's unified latent formulation and conditional design make it readily extensible to new tasks, providing an integrated foundation for building and scaling generative speech processing pipelines. To foster future research, we will open-source our codebase.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07558
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniFlow: Unifying Speech Front-End Tasks via Continuous Generative Modeling
Wang, Ziqian
Liu, Zikai
Zhu, Yike
Li, Xingchen
Kang, Boyi
Yao, Jixun
Xia, Xianjun
Huang, Chuanzeng
Xie, Lei
Audio and Speech Processing
Generative modeling has recently achieved remarkable success across image, video, and audio domains, demonstrating powerful capabilities for unified representation learning. Yet speech front-end tasks such as speech enhancement (SE), target speaker extraction (TSE), acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), and language-queried source separation (LASS) remain largely tackled by disparate, task-specific solutions. This fragmentation leads to redundant engineering effort, inconsistent performance, and limited extensibility. To address this gap, we introduce UniFlow, a unified framework that employs continuous generative modeling to tackle diverse speech front-end tasks in a shared latent space. Specifically, UniFlow utilizes a waveform variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn a compact latent representation of raw audio, coupled with a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that predicts latent updates. To differentiate the speech processing task during the training, learnable condition embeddings indexed by a task ID are employed to enable maximal parameter sharing while preserving task-specific adaptability. To balance model performance and computational efficiency, we investigate and compare three generative objectives: denoising diffusion, flow matching, and mean flow within the latent domain. We validate UniFlow on multiple public benchmarks, demonstrating consistent gains over state-of-the-art baselines. UniFlow's unified latent formulation and conditional design make it readily extensible to new tasks, providing an integrated foundation for building and scaling generative speech processing pipelines. To foster future research, we will open-source our codebase.
title UniFlow: Unifying Speech Front-End Tasks via Continuous Generative Modeling
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07558