Towards Lightweight Adaptation of Speech Enhancement Models in Real-World Environments
Organizations: Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that post-deployment adaptation can improve the robustness of speech enhancement models in unseen noise conditions. However, existing methods often incur prohibitive computational and memory costs, limiting their suitability for on-device deployment. In this work, we investigate model adaptation in realistic settings with dynamic acoustic scene changes and propose a lightweight framework that augments a frozen backbone with low-rank adapters updated via self-supervised training. Experiments on sequential scene evaluations spanning 111 environments across 37 noise types and three signal-to-noise ratio ranges, including the challenging [-8, 0] dB range, show that our method updates fewer than 1% of the base model's parameters while achieving an average 1.51 dB SI-SDR improvement within only 20 updates per scene. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our framework achieves competitive or superior perceptual quality with smoother and more stable convergence, demonstrating its practicality for lightweight on-device adaptation of speech enhancement models under real-world acoustic conditions.
Figures & tables
| Model | Sequential Scene? | Adaptation Framework | Adaptable Params | SNR [-8, 0] dB | SNR [0, 5] dB | SNR [5, 10] dB | |||||||
| # | % | PESQ | STOI | SI-SDR | PESQ | STOI | SI-SDR | PESQ | STOI | SI-SDR | |||
| Noisy Speech | 1.08 | 67.88 | -3.89 | 1.16 | 81.48 | 2.53 | 1.35 | 89.25 | 7.49 | ||||
| GRU* | Pretrained | 1.16 | 71.01 | 3.86 | 1.35 | 84.85 | 6.82 | 1.57 | 90.99 | 9.58 | |||
| ✗ | RemixIT | 230,144 | 100 | 1.19 | 71.64 | 4.64 | 1.39 | 84.96 | 8.27 | 1.62 | 91.07 | 11.50 | |
| ✗ | Ours | 512 | 0.22 | 1.22 | 71.96 | 4.71 | 1.44 | 85.34 | 8.36 | 1.67 | 91.38 | 11.43 | |
| ✓ | RemixIT | 230,144 | 100 | 1.18 | 70.34 | 4.63 | 1.34 | 83.13 | 8.42 | 1.51 | 88.63 | 11.03 | |
| (Rank, Scale) | Adaptable Params | PESQ | STOI | SI-SDR |
| Noisy | - | 1.20 | 79.54 | 2.04 |
| Pretrained | - | 1.36 | 82.28 | 6.75 |
| (16, 1) | 8,192 | 1.42 | 82.59 | 7.85 |
| (32, 1) | 16,384 | 1.43 | 82.88 | 7.91 |
| (64, 1) | 32,768 | 1.43 | 82.95 | 8.03 |
| (1, 32) | 512 | 1.42 | 82.81 | 8.04 |
Speech Enhancement
Speech enhancement improves intelligibility and listening quality by suppressing noise, reverberation, and competing speakers in recorded or live audio.
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