Ranking the Impact of Contextual Specialization in Neural Speech Enhancement

2026-07-06

AI Summary

This study investigates the effective utilization of contextual information to enhance neural speech enhancement performance under resource-constrained conditions. Through systematic evaluation of factors such as speaker identity, noise type, and language, the authors fine-tune and cross-lingually test models ranging from 10K to 5M parameters. The results demonstrate that speaker-specific adaptation yields the most substantial performance gains, significantly improving both speech intelligibility and quality. Notably, lightweight dual-specialized models—combining speaker and noise adaptation—achieve performance on par with or even surpassing that of general-purpose models ten times larger in specific scenarios. These findings underscore the efficiency and practical potential of small-scale adaptive architectures for real-world deployment.

Abstract

We systematically investigate neural speech enhancement systems, ranging from very small ($\sim$10\,k parameters) to medium-large ($\sim$2-5\,M parameters), which specialize to acoustic conditions using contextual information such as speaker identity, noise type, speaker gender, spoken language, and SNR. By fine-tuning generalist models on specific data subsets, we find that specializing to a speaker's identity consistently yields the largest gains in estimated speech intelligibility and quality. In contrast, specializing to SNR, noise type, or gender offers only marginal benefits. Crucially, we show that a small model specialized to both a specific speaker and a specific noise type can match or exceed the performance of a generalist model ten times its size. Further, cross-lingual tests reveal that models specialized to a target language outperform multilingual generalists, suggesting that language is a salient feature for specialization. These findings highlight the potential of small, adaptive models for resource-constrained applications like hearing aids, which specialize on-the-fly to contextual information.

Problem

• contextual specialization
• neural speech enhancement
• speaker identity
• noise type
• language

Innovation

• contextual specialization
• neural speech enhancement
• speaker identity
• small adaptive models
• cross-lingual adaptation