SEAL: Mixture-Closed Additive Reconstruction and Refinement-Aware Expert Routing for Efficient Speech Separation

Abstract:Compact time-frequency separators that mask the mixture and refine through a shared cell face two limits. First, a bounded multiplicative mask only scales a mixture bin, so where overlapping components cancel, the estimate stays small. Second, a shared cell applies the same weights to every time-frequency token at every step, so enlarging it adds compute everywhere. We present SEAL (Sparse Expert routing with Additive Latent reconstruction) to address both. For reconstruction, a zero-sum additive residual bounded by the local mixture amplitude lets estimates be nonzero where components cancel yet still sum to the mixture. For routing, a query built from acoustic and inter-step evidence sends each token to one of six residual experts, and a norm cap keeps the step cue from overriding clear acoustic evidence. On EchoSet, SEAL (small) surpasses TIGER (small) by 0.31 dB SI-SDRi with 28% fewer parameters and 2.9 times fewer MACs, and SEAL (large) is within 0.07 dB SI-SDRi of TIGER (large) at 3.1 times fewer MACs.

Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD)

arXiv:2610.07047 [eess.AS]

(or arXiv:2610.07047v1 [eess.AS] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.07047 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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