😃 About me

I am Dongheon Lee, a ML Engineer at SqueezeBits, formerly a research scientist intern at Meta Reality Labs Meta and a postdoctoral researcher at KAIST kaist. My research mainly focuses on speech enhancement, separation, and audio generation, including real-time, on-device models. I am interested in AR/VR, and speech recognition. I obtained Ph.D. (2025) and B.S. (2020) at KAIST, advised by Professor Jung-Woo Choi.

For more information, please refer to my CV

📌 Research Interests

  • Audio Signal Processing
  • Speech Signal Processing
  • Microphone Array Processing
  • Generative AI (Speech/Audio)

🔥 News

  • 2026.06:  🎉 One paper accepted to Interspeech, 2026
  • 2025.09:  🎉 One paper accepted to NeurIPS, 2025
  • 2025.07:  🎉 1st rank in DCASE 2025 task 4: Spatial Semantic Segmentation of Sound Scenes
  • 2025.06:  🎉 Join in Meta Reality Labs as research scientist intern

🏢 Work Experience

  • Jan.2026 - now: SqueezeBits
       ML Engineer
  • Jun.2025 - Dec.2025: Meta Reality Labs
       Research Scientist Intern, hosted by Juan Azcarreta and Buye Xu, Multichannel speech enhancement (Interspeech 2026)
  • Jun.2019 - Aug.2019: SK Hynix
       Research Intern, DRAN design (1st prize in internship project)

🏫 Education

  • Mar.2020 - Feb.2025: Ph.D. Electrical Engineering (KAIST)
       Dissertation: “Unified Auditory Scene Analysis and Separation using Dense Frequency-Time Attentive Network”
       Advisor: Prof. Jung-Woo Choi
  • Mar.2016 - Feb.2020: B.S. Electrical Engineering (KAIST)
  • Mar.2014 - Feb.2016: Changwon Science Highschool
       Early Graduation

📎 Selected Publications

[8] Dongheon Lee, Ashutosh Pandey, Sanjeel Parekh, Daniel Wong, Jacob Donley, Buye Xu, Juan Azcarreta, “Spatial-Magnifier: Spatial upsampling for multichannel speech enhancement,” Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2026

[7] Dongheon Lee, Younghoo Kwon, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeepASA: An object-oriented one-for-all network for auditory scene analysis,” The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025

[6] Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeFT-Mamba: Multichannel universal sound separation and polyphonic audio classification,” International Conference on Audio, Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025 (oral)

[5] Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeFTAN-II: Efficient multichannel speech enhancement with subgroup processing,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (IEEE/ACM TASLP) 2024

[4] Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeFTAN-AA: Array geometry-agnostic multichannel speech enhancement,” Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2024 (oral)

[3] Dongheon Lee, Dayun Choi, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeFT-AN RT: Real-time multichannel speech enhancement using Dense Frequency Time Attentive Network and non-overlapping synthesis window,” Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2023

[2] Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi, “DeFT-AN: Dense Frequency-Time Attentive Network for multichannel speech enhancement,” IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL) 2023

[1] Dongheon Lee, Byeongho Jo, Jung-Woo Choi, “Direction-of-arrival estimation with blind surface impedance compensation for spherical microphone array”, Journal of Acoustical Society of America Express Letters (JASA EL) 2021

📝 Publications (13 publications, 12 first-author)

2026

Interspeech 2026
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[C10] Spatial-Magnifier: Spatial upsampling for multichannel speech enhancement

Dongheon Lee, Ashutosh Pandey, Sanjeel Parekh, Daniel Wong, Jacob Donley, Buye Xu, Juan Azcarreta

Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2026

2025

NeurIPS 2025
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[C09] DeepASA:An object-oriented one-for-all network for auditory scene analysis

Dongheon Lee, Younghoo Kwon, and Jung-Woo Choi

The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025

DCASE 2025
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[C08] Self-guided target sound extraction and classification through universal sound separation model and multiple clues

Younghoo Kwon*, Dongheon Lee*, Dohwan Kim, and Jung-Woo Choi (*: Equal Contribution)

DCASE Technical Report 1st rank, Winner (DCASE) 2025

EuroNoise 2025
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[C07] Universal auditory scene analysis model for source separation, event localization, and detection

Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi

Forum Acusticum Euronoise (EuroNoise) 2025

ICASSP 2025
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[C06] DeFT-Mamba: Multichannel universal sound separation and polyphonic audio classification

Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi

International Conference on Audio, Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025 (oral)

Demo Page

2024

IEEE/ACM TASLP 2024
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[J05, C05] DeFTAN-II: Efficient multichannel speech enhancement with subgroup processing

Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (IEEE/ACM TASLP) 2024

GitHub Repo Demo Page

Interspeech 2024
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[C04] DeFTAN-AA: Array geometry-agnostic multichannel speech enhancement

Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi

Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2024 (oral)

Demo Page

2023

Interspeech 2023
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[C03] DeFT-AN RT: Real-time multichannel speech enhancement using Dense Frequency Time Attentive Network and non-overlapping synthesis window

Dongheon Lee, Dayun Choi, and Jung-Woo Choi

Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech) 2023

GitHub Repo

IEEE SPL 2023
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[J04, C02] DeFT-AN: Dense Frequency-Time Attentive Network for multichannel speech enhancement

Dongheon Lee, and Jung-Woo Choi

IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL) 2023

GitHub Repo

2022

Inter-Noise 2022
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[C01] Inter-channel Conv-TasNet for source-agnostic multichannel audio enhancement

Dongheon Lee, Jung-Woo Choi

51st International Congress Exposition on Noise Controal Engineering (Inter-Noise), 2022. (oral)

2021

Nanoscale 2021
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ArXiv 2021
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[J02] Inter-channel Conv-TasNet for multichannel speech enhancement

Dongheon Lee, Seongrae Kim, and Jung-Woo Choi

ArXiv, 2021

GitHub Repo

JASA EL 2021
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[J01] Direction-of-arrival estimation with blind surface impedance compensation for spherical microphone array

Dongheon Lee, Byeongho Jo, Jung-Woo Choi

Journal of Acoustical Society of America Express Letters (JASA EL) 2021

Academic Activities

💬 Invited Talks

  • 2024 Machine Learning and Big Data, Next-Generation ICT Research Center
  • 2023 On-device multichannel speech enhancement system, AICube
  • 2023 AI Specialized Training Program, KAIST-Hwaseong Hub

🏆 Awards

  • 1st Rank (Winner) of DCASE 2025 Task 4: Spatial Semantic Segmentation of Sound Scenes (2025)

  • Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, EE488B: Audio Signal Processing (2024)

  • Excellence Paper Award, Acoustical Society of Korea (2021)

  • 1st Prize in Internship Project, SK Hynix (2019)

📑 Reviewer

Confernce

  • IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA): 2025 ~

  • International Conference on Audio, Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP): 2025 ~

  • Proceedings of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech): 2025 ~

Journal

  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (IEEE/ACM TASLP)

  • IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL)

📏 Teaching Assistant

  • Signals and Systems, Mar. 2021 – Feb. 2024

  • Audio Signal Processing, Feb. 2024 – Jun. 2024

  • Individual Research, Mar. 2021 – Aug. 2024

🎏 Patent

  • Method and device of suppressing outdoor noise by using a microphone array, KR 10-2022-0131773

  • Method and apparatus for array geometry agnostic denoising and dereverberation based on deep learning, KR 10-2024-0063256

  • Voice enhancement method and system in eXtended Reality space for multi-party voice conversation, KR 10-2023-0150037