English

High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement via Discrete Audio Tokens

Sound 2025-10-03 v1 Machine Learning Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Recent autoregressive transformer-based speech enhancement (SE) methods have shown promising results by leveraging advanced semantic understanding and contextual modeling of speech. However, these approaches often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines and low sampling rate codecs, limiting them to narrow and task-specific speech enhancement. In this work, we introduce DAC-SE1, a simplified language model-based SE framework leveraging discrete high-resolution audio representations; DAC-SE1 preserves fine-grained acoustic details while maintaining semantic coherence. Our experiments show that DAC-SE1 surpasses state-of-the-art autoregressive SE methods on both objective perceptual metrics and in a MUSHRA human evaluation. We release our codebase and model checkpoints to support further research in scalable, unified, and high-quality speech enhancement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.02187,
  title  = {High-Fidelity Speech Enhancement via Discrete Audio Tokens},
  author = {Luca A. Lanzendörfer and Frédéric Berdoz and Antonis Asonitis and Roger Wattenhofer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.02187},
  year   = {2025}
}