Learning Interpretable Filters in Wav-UNet for Speech Enhancement

Due to their performances, deep neural networks have emerged as a major method in nearly all modern audio processing applications. Deep neural networks can be used to estimate some parameters or hyperparameters of a model, or in some cases the entire model in an end-To-end fashion. Although deep learning can lead to state of the art performances, they also suffer from inherent weaknesses as they usually remain complex and non interpretable to a large extent. For instance, the internal filters used in each layers are chosen in an adhoc manner with only a loose relation with the nature of the processed signal. We propose in this paper an approach to learn interpretable filters within a specific neural architecture which allow to better understand the behaviour of the neural network and to reduce its complexity. We validate the approach on a task of speech enhancement and show that the gain in interpretability does not degrade the performance of the model.