Weakly informed audio source separation

Prior information about the target source can improve audio source separation quality but is usually not available with the necessary level of audio alignment. This has limited its usability in the past. We propose a separation model that can nevertheless exploit such weak information for the separation task while aligning it on the mixture as a byproduct using an attention mechanism. We demonstrate the capabilities of the model on a singing voice separation task exploiting artificial side information with different levels of expressiveness. Moreover, we highlight an issue with the common separation quality assessment procedure regarding parts where targets or predictions are silent and refine a previous contribution for a more complete evaluation.