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Main Authors: Maciejewski, Matthew, Cornell, Samuele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08415
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author Maciejewski, Matthew
Cornell, Samuele
author_facet Maciejewski, Matthew
Cornell, Samuele
contents Noisy speech separation systems are typically trained on fully-synthetic mixtures, limiting generalization to real-world scenarios. Though training on mixtures of in-domain (thus often noisy) speech is possible, we show that this leads to undesirable optima where mixture noise is retained in the estimates, due to the inseparability of the background noises and the loss function's symmetry. To address this, we propose ring mixing, a batch strategy of using each source in two mixtures, alongside a new Signal-to-Consistency-Error Ratio (SCER) auxiliary loss penalizing inconsistent estimates of the same source from different mixtures, breaking symmetry and incentivizing denoising. On a WHAM!-based benchmark, our method can reduce residual noise by upwards of half, effectively learning to denoise from only noisy recordings. This opens the door to training more generalizable systems using in-the-wild data, which we demonstrate via systems trained using naturally-noisy speech from VoxCeleb.
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publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle Ring Mixing with Auxiliary Signal-to-Consistency-Error Ratio Loss for Unsupervised Denoising in Speech Separation
Maciejewski, Matthew
Cornell, Samuele
Audio and Speech Processing
Noisy speech separation systems are typically trained on fully-synthetic mixtures, limiting generalization to real-world scenarios. Though training on mixtures of in-domain (thus often noisy) speech is possible, we show that this leads to undesirable optima where mixture noise is retained in the estimates, due to the inseparability of the background noises and the loss function's symmetry. To address this, we propose ring mixing, a batch strategy of using each source in two mixtures, alongside a new Signal-to-Consistency-Error Ratio (SCER) auxiliary loss penalizing inconsistent estimates of the same source from different mixtures, breaking symmetry and incentivizing denoising. On a WHAM!-based benchmark, our method can reduce residual noise by upwards of half, effectively learning to denoise from only noisy recordings. This opens the door to training more generalizable systems using in-the-wild data, which we demonstrate via systems trained using naturally-noisy speech from VoxCeleb.
title Ring Mixing with Auxiliary Signal-to-Consistency-Error Ratio Loss for Unsupervised Denoising in Speech Separation
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08415