Separate and Reconstruct: Asymmetric Encoder-Decoder for Speech Separation

Since the success of a time-domain speech separation, further improvements have been made by expanding the length and channel of a feature sequence to increase the amount of computation. When temporally expanded to a long sequence, the feature is segmented into chunks as a dual-path model in most studies of speech separation. In particular, it is common for the process of separating features corresponding to each speaker to be located in the final stage of the network. However, it is more advantageous and intuitive to proactively expand the feature sequence to include the number of speakers as an extra dimension. In this paper, we present an asymmetric strategy in which the encoder and decoder are partitioned to perform distinct processing in separation tasks. The encoder analyzes features, and the output of the encoder is split into the number of speakers to be separated. The separated sequences are then reconstructed by the weight-shared decoder, as Siamese network, in addition to cross-speaker processing. By using the Siamese network in the decoder, without using speaker information, the network directly learns to discriminate the features using a separation objective. With a common split layer, intermediate encoder features for skip connections are also split for the reconstruction decoder based on the U-Net structure. In addition, instead of segmenting the feature into chunks as dual-path, we design global and local Transformer blocks to directly process long sequences. The experimental results demonstrated that this separation-and-reconstruction framework is effective and that the combination of proposed global and local Transformer can sufficiently replace the role of inter- and intra-chunk processing in dual-path structure. Finally, the presented model including both of these achieved state-of-the-art performance with less computation than before in various benchmark datasets.