Title: TF-Restormer: Complex Spectral Prediction for Speech Restoration
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: speech restoration, general speech enhancement, Transformer, Time-Frequency dual-path model, sampling-frequency-independent

Abstract: Speech restoration in real-world conditions is challenging due to compounded distortions such as clipping, band-pass filtering, digital artifacts, noise, and reverberation, and low sampling rates. Existing systems, including vocoder-based approaches, often sacrifice signal fidelity, while diffusion models remain impractical for streaming. Moreover, most assume a fixed target sampling rate, requiring external resampling that leads to redundant computations. We present TF-Restormer, an encoder-decoder architecture that concentrates analysis on input-bandwidth with a time-frequency dual-path encoder and reconstructs missing high-frequency bands through a light decoder with frequency extension queries. It enables efficient and universal restoration across arbitrary input-output rates without redundant resampling. To support adversarial training across diverse rates, we introduce a shared sampling-frequency-independent (SFI) STFT discriminator.
TF-Restormer further supports streaming with a causal time module, and improves robustness under extreme degradations by injecting spectral inductive bias into the frequency module. Finally, we propose a scaled log-spectral loss that stabilizes optimization under severe conditions while emphasizing well-predicted spectral details. As a single model across sampling rates, TF-Restormer consistently outperforms prior systems, achieving balanced gains in signal fidelity and perceptual quality, while its streaming mode maintains competitive performance for real-time use. Anonymous code and demos are available at https://tf-restormer.github.io/demo.