Iterative autoregression: a novel trick to improve your low-latency speech enhancement model

Streaming models are an essential component of real-time speech enhancement tools. The streaming regime constrains speech enhancement models to use only a tiny context of future information, thus, the low-latency streaming setup is generally assumed to be challenging and has a significant negative effect on the model quality. However, due to the sequential nature of streaming generation, it provides a natural possibility for autoregression, i.e., using previous predictions when making current ones. In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective trick for training of autoregressive low-latency speech enhancement models. We demonstrate that the proposed technique leads to stable improvement across different architectures and training scenarios.