Title: VoiceBridge: Designing Latent Bridge Models for General Speech Restoration at Scale
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Schrödinger Bridge, General Speech Restoration

Abstract: Bridge models have recently been explored for speech enhancement tasks such as denoising, dereverberation, and super-resolution, while these efforts are typically confined to a single task or small-scale datasets, with constrained general speech restoration (GSR) capability at scale.
In this work, we introduce VoiceBridge, a GSR system rooted in latent bridge models (LBMs), capable of reconstructing high-fidelity speech at full-band (\textit{i.e.,} 48kHz) from various distortions. 
By compressing speech waveform into continuous latent representations, VoiceBridge models the \textit{diverse LQ-to-HQ tasks} (namely, low-quality to high-quality) in GSR with \textit{a single latent-to-latent generative process} backed by a scalable transformer architecture.
To better inherit the advantages of bridge models from the data domain to the latent space, we present an energy-preserving variational autoencoder, enhancing the alignment between the waveform and latent space over varying energy levels. Furthermore, to address the difficulty of HQ reconstruction from distinctively different LQ priors, we propose a joint neural prior, uniformly alleviating the reconstruction burden of LBM. At last, considering the key requirement of GSR systems, human perceptual quality, a perceptually aware fine-tuning stage is designed to mitigate the cascading mismatch in generation while improving perceptual alignment. 
Extensive validation across in-domain and out-of-domain tasks and datasets (\textit{e.g.}, refining recent zero-shot speech and podcast generation results) demonstrates the superior performance of VoiceBridge.
Demo samples can be visited at: \url{https://VoiceBridgedemo.github.io/}.