TasNet: time-domain audio separation network for real-time, single-channel speech separation

Robust speech processing in multi-talker environments requires effective speech separation. Recent deep learning systems have made significant progress toward solving this problem, yet it remains challenging particularly in real-time, short latency applications. Most methods attempt to construct a mask for each source in time-frequency representation of the mixture signal which is not necessarily an optimal representation for speech separation. In addition, time-frequency decomposition results in inherent problems such as phase/magnitude decoupling and long time window which is required to achieve sufficient frequency resolution. We propose Time-domain Audio Separation Network (TasNet) to overcome these limitations. We directly model the signal in the time-domain using an encoder-decoder framework and perform the source separation on nonnegative encoder outputs. This method removes the frequency decomposition step and reduces the separation problem to estimation of source masks on encoder outputs which is then synthesized by the decoder. Our system outperforms the current state-of-the-art causal and noncausal speech separation algorithms, reduces the computational cost of speech separation, and significantly reduces the minimum required latency of the output. This makes TasNet suitable for applications where low-power, real-time implementation is desirable such as in hearable and telecommunication devices.Comment: Camera ready version for ICASSP 2018, Calgary, Canad

Generalised theory on asymptotic stability and boundedness of stochastic functional differential equations

Asymptotic stability and boundedness have been two of most popular topics in the study of stochastic functional differential equations (SFDEs) (see e.g. Appleby and Reynolds (2008), Appleby and Rodkina (2009), Basin and Rodkina (2008), Khasminskii (1980), Mao (1995), Mao (1997), Mao (2007), Rodkina and Basin (2007), Shu, Lam, and Xu (2009), Yang, Gao, Lam, and Shi (2009), Yuan and Lygeros (2005) and Yuan and Lygeros (2006)). In general, the existing results on asymptotic stability and boundedness of SFDEs require (i) the coefficients of the SFDEs obey the local Lipschitz condition and the linear growth condition; (ii) the diffusion operator of the SFDEs acting on a C2,1-function be bounded by a polynomial with the same order as the C2,1-function. However, there are many SFDEs which do not obey the linear growth condition. Moreover, for such highly nonlinear SFDEs, the diffusion operator acting on a C2,1-function is generally bounded by a polynomial with a higher order than the C2,1-function. Hence the existing criteria on stability and boundedness for SFDEs are not applicable andwesee the necessity to develop new criteria. Our main aim in this paper is to establish new criteria where the linear growth condition is no longer needed while the up-bound for the diffusion operator may take a much more general form