In this paper, we propose a deep neural network (DNN)-based single-microphone speech enhancement algorithm characterized by a short latency and low computational resources. Many speech enhancement algorithms suffer from low noise reduction capabilities between pitch harmonics, and in severe cases, the harmonic structure may even be lost. Recognizing this drawback, we propose a new weighted loss that emphasizes pitch-dominated frequency bands. For that, we propose a method, applied only at the training stage, to detect these frequency bands. The proposed method is applied to speech signals contaminated by several noise types, and in particular, typical domestic noise drawn from ESC-50 and DE-MAND databases, demonstrating its applicability to ‘stay-at-home’ scenarios.

Error correction codes are an integral part of communication applications, boosting the reliability of transmission. The optimal decoding of transmitted codewords is the maximum likelihood rule, which is NP-hard due to the curse of dimensionality. For practical realizations, sub-optimal decoding algorithms are employed; yet limited theoretical insights prevent one from exploiting the full potential of these algorithms. One such insight is the choice of permutation in permutation decoding. We present a data-driven framework for permutation selection, combining domain knowledge with machine learning concepts such as node embedding and self-attention. Significant and consistent improvements in the bit error rate are introduced for all simulated codes, over the baseline decoders. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work is the first to leverage the benefits of the neural Transformer networks in physical layer communication systems.

Ensemble models are widely used to solve complex tasks by their decomposition into multiple simpler tasks, each one solved locally by a single member of the ensemble. Decoding of error-correction codes is a hard problem due to the curse of dimensionality, leading one to consider ensembles-of-decoders as a possible solution. Nonetheless, one must take complexity into account, especially in decoding. We suggest a low-complexity scheme where a single member participates in the decoding of each word. First, the distribution of feasible words is partitioned into non-overlapping regions. Thereafter, specialized experts are formed by independently training each member on a single region. A classical hard-decision decoder (HDD) is employed to map every word to a single expert in an injective manner. FER gains of up to 0.4dB at the waterfall region, and of 1.25dB at the error floor region are achieved for two BCH(63,36) and (63,45) codes with cycle-reduced parity-check matrices, compared to the previous best result of [1].

High quality data is essential in deep learning to train a robust model. While in other fields data is sparse and costly to collect, in error decoding it is free to query and label thus allowing potential data exploitation. Utilizing this fact and inspired by active learning, two novel methods are introduced to improve Weighted Belief Propagation (WBP) decoding. These methods incorporate machine-learning concepts with error decoding measures. For BCH(63,36), (63,45) and (127,64) codes, with cycle-reduced parity-check matrices, improvement of up to 0.4dB at the waterfall region, and of up to 1.5dB at the error-floor region in FER, over the original WBP, is demonstrated by smartly sampling the data, without increasing inference (decoding) complexity. The proposed methods constitutes an example guidelines for model enhancement by incorporation of domain knowledge from error-correcting field into a deep learning model. These guidelines can be adapted to any other deep learning based communication block.