Distilled Binary Neural Network for Monaural Speech Separation

Monaural speech separation, aiming at solving the cocktail party problem, has many important application scenarios, most of which ask for the real-time response, high energy efficiency and efficient storage. However, the state-of-the-art Deep Neural Network based separation models usually require huge memory and computation for the 32-bit floating point multiply accumulations, hence most of them cannot meet those requirements. Recently, there are many methods proposed to solve the problem, and binary neural networks have drawn many attentions for they compress and speed up its counterparts at the cost of some performance. Hence, in this paper, we binarize Deep Neural Network based separation models, aiming to deploy them on embedded devices for real-time applications. Furthermore, we improve the separation performance by integrating knowledge distillation into the training phase of binary neural network based models, which is referred as Distilled Binary Neural Network (DBNN). To the best of our knowledge, DBNN is the first attempt to integrate two types of model compression. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which successfully binarizes the Deep Neural Network based separation models with a comparable performance.