Improving Label Assignments Learning by Dynamic Sample Dropout Combined
  with Layer-wise Optimization in Speech Separation
Chenyang Gao Yue Gu Ivan Marsic
In supervised speech separation, permutation invariant training (PIT) is
widely used to handle label ambiguity by selecting the best permutation to
update the model. Despite its success, previous studies showed that PIT is
plagued by excessive label assignment switching in adjacent epochs, impeding
the model to learn better label assignments. To address this issue, we propose
a novel training strategy, dynamic sample dropout (DSD), which considers
previous best label assignments and evaluation metrics to exclude the samples
that may negatively impact the learned label assignments during training.
Additionally, we include layer-wise optimization (LO) to improve the
performance by solving layer-decoupling. Our experiments showed that combining
DSD and LO outperforms the baseline and solves excessive label assignment
switching and layer-decoupling issues. The proposed DSD and LO approach is easy
to implement, requires no extra training sets or steps, and shows generality to
various speech separation tasks.