Parallel Time-Band Mixing with Learned Observation-Adding for Robust ASR Front-Ends
Xingyu ShenRunze WangWei-Ping ZhuBenoit Champagne
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
Speech enhancement is often used as a front-end for robust ASR, yet recurrent temporal and cross-band modules introduce sequential dependencies that reduce parallel efficiency. In this paper, we present a sequence-parallel band-split enhancement front-end built on a Parallel Time-Band Mixer (PTBM) block that eliminates within-block recurrent unrolling. PTBM integrates intra-band temporal mixing and per-frame cross-band attention within a unified parallel architecture, enabling efficient contextual modeling across both time and frequency dimensions. The system retains the mask-plus-residual reconstruction interface and introduces learned Observation-Adding (LOA) to suppress ASR-sensitive artifacts without development-set tuning. Experiments on DNS Challenge and CHiME-4 with frozen Whisper back-ends show that the proposed front-end consistently reduces word error rate relative to recurrent band-split baselines while requiring only 0.96 M parameters and 0.58 GMAC/s for the front-end network.
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