Diffusion Buffer: Online Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement with Sub-Second Latency

This repository contains the official PyTorch implementations for the papers:

• Bunlong Lay, Rostislav Makarov, Timo Gerkmann "Diffusion Buffer: Online Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement with Sub-Second Latency", ISCA Interspeech, Rotterdam, August 2025. [bibtex]

Find a demo video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do0Vmwlih4w

Installation

Clone the repository and install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/sp-uhh/Diffusion-Buffer.git
cd Diffusion-Buffer
pip install -r requirements.txt

Pretrained checkpoints

-Find here the ckpt of BBED with B = 30 reverse steps/buffer length from the paper when trained on filtered EARS-WHAM: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NjNiPj42wZ6NyQT4ykZcwxNjhqkbnLD9?usp=drive_link. See under eval how to evaluate this.

Training

Training is done by executing train.py. An example (this will reproduce BBED with B = 30 reverse steps/buffer length from the paper when trained on filtered EARS-WHAM) is:

python train.py --base_dir <enterpath> --batch_size 32 --backbone ncsnpp --sde bbed --format ears_wham \
--t_eps 0.03 --num_eval_files 3 --spec_abs_exponent 0.5 --spec_factor 0.15 --loss_abs_exponent 1 --loss_type mse --theta 0.08 --k 2.6 --timestep_type_inf default \
--wandb_name <entername> --fs 16000 --audiologs_every_epoch 25 --speclogs_every_epoch 25 --save_every_n_epochs 0 --wandb_project_name <entername> --ch_mult 1 2 2 2 \
--hop_length 256 --n_fft 510 --num_frames 128 --normalize not --output_scale time --num_res_blocks 1 --format noise \
--diff_buffer_range 30 31 --nf 96 --wandb_entity <entername> --diff_buffer_length_inference 30 --T_sampling 0.8

Evaluation

To evaluate on a test set, run

python eval.py --test_dir <path_to_testdir> \
            --experiments_folder <parent_folder> \
            --destination_folder <subfolder> \
            --reverse_starting_point <enter_rsp_from_ckpt> --N <enter_bufferlength_from_ckpt> \
            --ckpt <path_to_ckpt.ckpt>

to generate the enhanced .wav files and compute metrics on the enhanced files (the test_dir must contain noisy and clean) The enhanced files are saved in parent_folder/subfolder given by experiments_folder and destination_folder. Note that this script evaluates in an online fashion. For the provided ckpt above please set reverse_starting_point to 0.8, and N to 30.

Citations / References

We kindly ask you to cite our papers in your publication when using any of our research or code:

@inproceedings{lay24diffbuffer,
  author={Bunlong Lay and Rostislav Makarov and Timo Gerkmann},
  title={Diffusion Buffer: Online Diffusion-based Speech Enhancement with Sub-Second Latency},
  year={2025},
  booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2025},
}