# An efficient encoder-decoder architecture with top-down attention for speech separation

#### Anonymous authors

#### Paper under double-blind review

### Abstract

Deep neural networks have shown excellent prospects in speech separation tasks. However, finding the balance between model complexity and performance is still challenging in real-world applications. In this paper, we provide a bio-inspired efficient encoder-decoder architecture by mimicking the brain's top-down attention, called TDANet, with decreased model complexity without sacrificing performance. More specifically, the top-down attention in TDANet is extracted by the global attention (GA) module and the cascaded local attention (LA) layers. The GA module takes multi-scale acoustic features as input to extract global attention signal, which then modulates features of different scale by direct top-down connections. The LA layers use features of adjacent layers as input to extract the local attention signal, which is used to modulate the lateral input in a top-down manner. On three benchmark datasets, TDANet consistently achieved competitive separation performance with high efficiency. Specifically, TDANet's multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) are only 3.7% of A-FRCNN, and CPU inference time is only 14.8% of A-FRCNN. In addition, we propose a large-size variant: TDANet Large, which can obtain state-of-the-art results on three datasets, with MACs still only 7% of A-FRCNN and the CPU inference time is only 33% of A-FRCNN. Our study suggests that top-down attention can be a more efficient strategy for speech separation with less computational cost.

### Links

### Speech Samples

The model is evaluated with LRS2-2Mix [1]:

Mixture input | SudoRM-RF2 | DualPathRNN3 | A-FRCNN-164 | Sepformer5 | TDANet (ours) | TDANet Large (ours) | Ground-Truth
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## References

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