Zhengyi Lu, Aswini Sivakumar, Jie Hu +1cs.SD cs.AI
Generative speech enhancement faces three gaps: spectral models capture harmonic structure but often disrupt phase, waveform models preserve phase but miss harmonics, and Schrödinger Bridges (SB) shorten transport from noise to clean speech but leave inference cost only loosely tied to training. We propose HybridSB-MoE, a dual-domain framework that fills these gaps through three contributions unified by a single asymmetric design principle. (i) Asymmetric uncertainty fusion: The spectral path captures epistemic uncertainty via expert disagreement, while the waveform bridge models aleatoric variance through stochastic dynamics. We fuse them asymmetrically, allowing the mixing weight to adapt to distinct error regimes rather than average predictions. (ii) Heterogeneous MoE with top-k=2 routing across five distinct architectural archetypes, where architectural diversity makes the epistemic signal indicate which inductive bias fails rather than small perturbations among similar experts. (iii) Discretization bound (Theorem 1): path-consistency and trajectory regularizers together bound the K-step bridge sampling error in 2-Wasserstein distance at rate K-alpha, making small-K inference an objective-level guarantee rather than an empirical claim. On VoiceBank+DEMAND, HybridSB-MoE outperforms diffusion- and SB-based baselines at their step budgets while remaining competitive with consistency-distilled few-step methods.
Youran Ni, Shihong Tan, Yuzhu Wang +1eess.AS cs.AI cs.SD
Music source restoration (MSR) requires jointly addressing source unmixing and the inversion of non-linear production effects. Current methods struggle to achieve accurate target signal reconstruction while maintaining semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose DTT-BSR+, a two-stage cascade MSR system that decouples distribution fitting from signal reconstruction into separate stages. A generative DTT-BSR separator in the first stage produces stems matching the prior of clean sources, and a modified Demucs network in the second stage enhances the first stage output using time-domain and multi-resolution spectral losses. DTT-BSR+ improves multi-mel signal-to-noise ratio (MMSNR) over the single-stage DTT-BSR across all stems, and surpasses the state-of-the-art X-LANCE MSR system on five stems. We also reveal through Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD) decomposition an implicit trade-off between signal reconstruction accuracy and semantic distribution fitting across stems.
Muhammad Taimoor Haseeb, Ahmad Hammoudeh, Gus Xiacs.SD cs.LG
Search, a foundational operation in computer science, maps a query to a matching item in a collection. It is typically implemented as a System-2 like, rule-based pipeline in which a key is computed, an index is probed, and candidates are verified. By contrast, human recognition resembles a System-1 like, associative model of identity recovery, in which even partial cues can trigger a recall without explicitly enumerating, ranking, or even accessing discrete candidates. Here, we show that music sound identification, a difficult search problem, can be performed in a single neural feed-forward pass by a generative transformer. Trained on an audio dataset, the model predicts the corresponding track identifier from a short audio excerpt. This approach surpasses state-of-the-art acoustic fingerprinting, with the largest gains for short audio segments (1 second), demonstrating the method is not only viable but advantageous. Moreover, it reduces external storage to 0.33% of the baseline footprint and improves inference latency by 2.3x (p95). Furthermore, the model can reject queries for unseen tracks, supporting open-set operation while reducing misattribution risk. Using music track identification as an example, this work reframes search, bringing it closer in spirit to human associative recognition and away from algorithmic database lookup.
Liang Xu, Diego Caviedes-Nozal, Bastiaan Kleijn +2cs.SD cs.AI eess.AS eess.SP
We propose Speech Enhancement based on Drifting Models (DriftSE), a novel generative framework that formulates denoising as an equilibrium problem. Rather than relying on iterative sampling, DriftSE natively achieves one-step inference by evolving the pushforward distribution of a mapping function to directly match the clean speech distribution. This evolution is driven by a Drifting Field, a learned correction vector that guides samples toward the high-density regions of the clean distribution, which naturally facilitates training on unpaired data by matching distributions rather than paired samples. We investigate the framework under two formulations: a direct mapping from the noisy observation, and a stochastic conditional generative model from a Gaussian prior. Experiments on the VoiceBank-DEMAND benchmark demonstrate that DriftSE achieves high-fidelity enhancement in a single step, outperforming multi-step diffusion baselines and establishing a new paradigm for speech enhancement.