SuperM2M: Supervised and mixture-to-mixture co-learning for speech enhancement and noise-robust ASR

The current dominant approach for neural speech enhancement is based on supervised learning by using simulated training data. The trained models, however, often exhibit limited generalizability to real-recorded data. To address this, this paper investigates training enhancement models directly on real target-domain data. We propose to adapt mixture-to-mixture (M2M) training, originally designed for speaker separation, for speech enhancement, by modeling multi-source noise signals as a single, combined source. In addition, we propose a co-learning algorithm that improves M2M with the help of supervised algorithms. When paired close-talk and far-field mixtures are available for training, M2M realizes speech enhancement by training a deep neural network (DNN) to produce speech and noise estimates in a way such that they can be linearly filtered to reconstruct the close-talk and far-field mixtures. This way, the DNN can be trained directly on real mixtures, and can leverage close-talk and far-field mixtures as a weak supervision to enhance far-field mixtures. To improve M2M, we combine it with supervised approaches to co-train the DNN, where mini-batches of real close-talk and far-field mixture pairs and mini-batches of simulated mixture and clean speech pairs are alternately fed to the DNN, and the loss functions are respectively (a) the mixture reconstruction loss on the real close-talk and far-field mixtures and (b) the regular enhancement loss on the simulated clean speech and noise. We find that, this way, the DNN can learn from real and simulated data to achieve better generalization to real data. We name this algorithm SuperM2M (supervised and mixture-to-mixture co-learning). Evaluation results on the CHiME-4 dataset show its effectiveness and potential.