MAGE: A Coarse-to-Fine Speech Enhancer with Masked Generative Model

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Main Authors: Pham, The Hieu, Nguyen, Tan Dat, Tran, Phuong Thanh, Chung, Joon Son, Nguyen, Duc Dung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pham, The Hieu
Nguyen, Tan Dat
Tran, Phuong Thanh
Chung, Joon Son
Nguyen, Duc Dung
author_facet Pham, The Hieu
Nguyen, Tan Dat
Tran, Phuong Thanh
Chung, Joon Son
Nguyen, Duc Dung
contents Speech enhancement remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and perceptual quality. In this paper, we introduce MAGE, a Masked Audio Generative Enhancer that advances generative speech enhancement through a compact and robust design. Unlike prior masked generative models with random masking, MAGE employs a scarcity-aware coarse-to-fine masking strategy that prioritizes frequent tokens in early steps and rare tokens in later refinements, improving efficiency and generalization. We also propose a lightweight corrector module that further stabilizes inference by detecting low-confidence predictions and re-masking them for refinement. Built on BigCodec and finetuned from Qwen2.5-0.5B, MAGE is reduced to 200M parameters through selective layer retention. Experiments on DNS Challenge and noisy LibriSpeech show that MAGE achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality and significantly reduces word error rate for downstream recognition, outperforming larger baselines. Audio examples are available at https://hieugiaosu.github.io/MAGE/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MAGE: A Coarse-to-Fine Speech Enhancer with Masked Generative Model
Pham, The Hieu
Nguyen, Tan Dat
Tran, Phuong Thanh
Chung, Joon Son
Nguyen, Duc Dung
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Speech enhancement remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and perceptual quality. In this paper, we introduce MAGE, a Masked Audio Generative Enhancer that advances generative speech enhancement through a compact and robust design. Unlike prior masked generative models with random masking, MAGE employs a scarcity-aware coarse-to-fine masking strategy that prioritizes frequent tokens in early steps and rare tokens in later refinements, improving efficiency and generalization. We also propose a lightweight corrector module that further stabilizes inference by detecting low-confidence predictions and re-masking them for refinement. Built on BigCodec and finetuned from Qwen2.5-0.5B, MAGE is reduced to 200M parameters through selective layer retention. Experiments on DNS Challenge and noisy LibriSpeech show that MAGE achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality and significantly reduces word error rate for downstream recognition, outperforming larger baselines. Audio examples are available at https://hieugiaosu.github.io/MAGE/.
title MAGE: A Coarse-to-Fine Speech Enhancer with Masked Generative Model
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19881