Unsupervised source separation via Bayesian inference in the latent domain

Abstract

State of the art audio source separation models rely on supervised data-driven approaches, which can be expensive in terms of labeling resources. On the other hand, approaches for training these models without any direct supervision are typically high-demanding in terms of memory and time requirements, and remain impractical to be used at inference time. We aim to tackle these limitations by proposing a simple yet effective unsupervised separation algorithm, which operates directly on a latent representation of time-domain signals. Our algorithm relies on deep Bayesian priors in the form of pre-trained autoregressive networks to model the probability distributions of each source. We leverage the low cardinality of the discrete latent space, trained with a novel loss term imposing a precise arithmetic structure on it, to perform exact Bayesian inference without relying on an approximation strategy. We validate our approach on the Slakh dataset arXiv:1909.08494, demonstrating results in line with state of the art supervised approaches while requiring fewer resources with respect to other unsupervised methods.

Publication
arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05313
Michele Mancusi
Michele Mancusi
PhD Student

PhD Student @SapienzaRoma CS | Intern @Musixmatch

Emilian Postolache
Emilian Postolache
Senior AI Research Scientist

Senior AI Research Scientist @ Iris Audio

Giorgio Mariani
Giorgio Mariani
PhD Student

Refactor specialist

Marco Fumero
Marco Fumero
PhD Student
Andrea Santilli
Andrea Santilli
PhD Student

PhD Student passionate about natural language processing, representation learning and machine intelligence.

Luca Cosmo
Luca Cosmo
Assistant Professor
Emanuele Rodolà
Emanuele Rodolà
Full Professor