The study examines how the realism of synthetic room impulse response (RIR) datasets influences the training of DeepFilterNet3 for single‑channel speech enhancement. By comparing a DNS4 image‑source‑method RIR set with a higher‑fidelity hybrid wave‑based and geometrical acoustics RIR set, the authors find that the more realistic dataset consistently improves objective speech enhancement metrics and significantly reduces ASR word error rates on unseen measured RIRs. The results suggest that overall realism in synthetic acoustic training data enhances DeepFilterNet3’s generalization to new environments.
By Alessia Milo, Georg G\"otz, Steinar Gu{\dh}j\'onsson, Daniel Gert Nielsen, Jesper Pedersen, Finnur Pind
arXiv:2605. 07694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Single-channel speaker distance estimation has recently achieved centimeter-level accuracy in simulated environments, yet it remains unclear which components of the room impulse response (RIR) the model exploits and how performance depends on the recording conditions.
By Michael Neri, Archontis Politis, Tuomas Virtanen
arXiv:2509. 15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications.
By Chen Si, Qianyi Wu, Chaitanya Amballa, Romit Roy Choudhury
arXiv:2606. 29031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In regulated domains such as banking and healthcare, where privacy constraints make real speech costly to collect and retain, synthetic speech from modern text-to-speech (TTS) is an appealing alternative for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) without exposing sensitive customer recordings.
By Yanis Labrak, Dairazalia Sanchez-Cortes, Sergio Burdisso, S\'everin Baroudi, Shashi Kumar, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Srikanth Madikeri, Manjunath K E, Old\v{r}ich Plchot, Kadri Hacio\u{g}lu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv:2607. 04471v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear spatial filters (beamformers) enable robust, generalizable and interpretable speech enhancement with performance guarantees under ideal parameterization.
By Jakob Kienegger, Tal Peer, Sina Khanagha, Timo Gerkmann
arXiv:2607. 01527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Room embeddings derived from reverberant speech are often unreliable: speech content and recording degradation can alter the representation even when speaker, room, and source-receiver geometry remain unchanged, degrading downstream task performance.
By Yang Xiang, Philipp G\"otz, Emanu\"el A. P. Habets, Andreas Walther, Wenwu Wang, Philip J. B. Jackson
arXiv:2607. 02343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can selectively attend to a target sound and estimate its direction in complex scenarios, whereas such selective localization remains challenging for current deep learning-based systems.
By Ziyang Jiang, Yu Chen, Zexu Pan, Xinyuan Qian, Bowen Xing, Ivor W. Tsang, Xu-Cheng Yin, Haizhou Li
Humans can selectively attend to a target sound and estimate its direction in complex scenarios, whereas such selective localization remains challenging for current deep learning-based systems. Sound source localization (SSL) has achieved remarkable success with deep learning, yet most methods localize all active sources without selectivity.
The paper introduces RALCT, a lightweight Convolutional Transformer that combines randomized audio augmentations, MFCCs, and log‑mel spectrograms to extract robust features for environmental sound recognition. With only about 310,000 parameters, RALCT achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy—over 93% on UrbanSound8K, peaking at 94.56%—making it suitable for deployment on mobile devices. The authors also develop a mobile app that integrates the model to provide real‑time safety alerts for hearing‑impaired users.
By Julia Huang
arXiv:2602. 01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise.
By Yochai Yemini, Yoav Ellinson, Rami Ben-Ari, Sharon Gannot, Ethan Fetaya
arXiv:2607. 03806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio foundation models are widely adopted as general-purpose feature extractors, yet the internal structure of their learned representations remains insufficiently understood.
By H\'ector Martel, Joe Hennessy-Priest, Taemin Cho
arXiv:2604. 01832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce GAP-URGENet, a generative-predictive fusion framework developed for Track 1 of the ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge.
By Xiaobin Rong, Yushi Wang, Zheng Wang, Jing Lu