Attention does not guarantee best performance in speech enhancement

Abstract: Attention mechanism has been widely utilized in speech enhancement (SE) because theoretically it can effectively model the long-term inherent connection of signal both in time domain and spectrum domain. However, the generally used global attention mechanism might not be the best choice since the adjacent information naturally imposes more influence than the far-apart information in speech enhancement. In this paper, we validate this conjecture by replacing attention with RNN in two typical state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, multi-scale temporal frequency convolutional network (MTFAA) with axial attention and conformer-based metric-GAN network (CMGAN).