arXiv research

Score calibration enables automatic speaker recognizers to make cost-effective accept / reject decisions. Traditional calibration requires supervised data, which is an expensive resource. We propose a 2-component GMM for unsupervised calibration and demonstrate good performance relative to a supervised baseline on NIST…

Study optimal investment and reinsurance strategy for insurers under random coefficients.

We present a new Q-function operator for temporal difference (TD) learning methods that explicitly encodes robustness against significant rare events (SRE) in critical domains. The operator, which we call the $κ$-operator, allows to learn a robust policy in a model-based fashion without actually observing the SRE. We i…

New GoF test improves change point detection in multivariate time series.

This paper presents the Intelligent Voice (IV) system submitted to the NIST 2016 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE). The primary emphasis of SRE this year was on developing speaker recognition technology which is robust for novel languages that are much more heterogeneous than those used in the current state-of-the-a…

NIST CTS Superset offers a large dataset for telephony speaker recognition.

Paper solves complex game theory problems with new equations.

The standard state-of-the-art backend for text-independent speaker recognizers that use i-vectors or x-vectors, is Gaussian PLDA (G-PLDA), assisted by a Gaussianization step involving length normalization. G-PLDA can be trained with both generative or discriminative methods. It has long been known that heavy-tailed PLD…

T-PSDA improves speaker recognition accuracy on toroidal submanifolds.

State-of-the-art speaker recognition systems comprise an x-vector (or i-vector) speaker embedding front-end followed by a probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) backend. The effectiveness of these components relies on the availability of a large collection of labeled training data. In practice, it is common …

Study long-term behavior of semi-Markov modulated processes using integral functions.

Graph neural networks refine speaker embeddings for better session-level diarization.

The change of two orders of magnitude in the 'new DCF' of NIST's SRE'10, relative to the 'old DCF' evaluation criterion, posed a difficult challenge for participants and evaluator alike. Initially, participants were at a loss as to how to calibrate their systems, while the evaluator underestimated the required number o…

We introduce a Bayesian solution for the problem in forensic speaker recognition, where there may be very little background material for estimating score calibration parameters. We work within the Bayesian paradigm of evidence reporting and develop a principled probabilistic treatment of the problem, which results in a…

In this paper we describe the recent advancements made in the IBM i-vector speaker recognition system for conversational speech. In particular, we identify key techniques that contribute to significant improvements in performance of our system, and quantify their contributions. The techniques include: 1) a nearest-neig…

Prior-weighted logistic regression has become a standard tool for calibration in speaker recognition. Logistic regression is the optimization of the expected value of the logarithmic scoring rule. We generalize this via a parametric family of proper scoring rules. Our theoretical analysis shows how different members of…

In some speaker recognition scenarios we find conversations recorded simultaneously over multiple channels. That is the case of the interviews in the NIST SRE dataset. To take advantage of that, we propose a modification of the PLDA model that considers two different inter-session variability terms. The first term is t…

In recent work on both generative and discriminative score to log-likelihood-ratio calibration, it was shown that linear transforms give good accuracy only for a limited range of operating points. Moreover, these methods required tailoring of the calibration training objective functions in order to target the desired r…

Improved GoF statistics using entropy-regularized optimal transport for multivariate rank.

More and more neural network approaches have achieved considerable improvement upon submodules of speaker diarization system, including speaker change detection and segment-wise speaker embedding extraction. Still, in the clustering stage, traditional algorithms like probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) ar…

We explore 4d Yang-Mills gauge theories (YM) living as boundary conditions of 5d gapped short/long-range entangled (SRE/LRE) topological states. Specifically, we explore 4d time-reversal symmetric pure YM of an SU(2) gauge group with a second-Chern-class topological term at $θ=π$ (SU(2)$_{θ=π}$ YM), by turning on backg…

New system for i-vector speaker recognition based on variational autoencoder (VAE) is investigated. VAE is a promising approach for developing accurate deep nonlinear generative models of complex data. Experiments show that VAE provides speaker embedding and can be effectively trained in an unsupervised manner. LLR est…

In this paper, we propose a fully supervised speaker diarization approach, named unbounded interleaved-state recurrent neural networks (UIS-RNN). Given extracted speaker-discriminative embeddings (a.k.a. d-vectors) from input utterances, each individual speaker is modeled by a parameter-sharing RNN, while the RNN state…

For many years, i-vector based audio embedding techniques were the dominant approach for speaker verification and speaker diarization applications. However, mirroring the rise of deep learning in various domains, neural network based audio embeddings, also known as d-vectors, have consistently demonstrated superior spe…

We investigate deep neural network performance in the textindependent speaker recognition task. We demonstrate that using angular softmax activation at the last classification layer of a classification neural network instead of a simple softmax activation allows to train a more generalized discriminative speaker embedd…

State-of-the-art speaker recognition relays on models that need a large amount of training data. This models are successful in tasks like NIST SRE because there is sufficient data available. However, in real applications, we usually do not have so much data and, in many cases, the speaker labels are unknown. We present…

Embeddings in machine learning are low-dimensional representations of complex input patterns, with the property that simple geometric operations like Euclidean distances and dot products can be used for classification and comparison tasks. The proposed meta-embeddings are special embeddings that live in more general in…

Speaker verification (SV) systems using deep neural network embeddings, so-called the x-vector systems, are becoming popular due to its good performance superior to the i-vector systems. The fusion of these systems provides improved performance benefiting both from the discriminatively trained x-vectors and generative …

The front-end factor analysis (FEFA), an extension of principal component analysis (PPCA) tailored to be used with Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), is currently the prevalent approach to extract compact utterance-level features (i-vectors) for automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems. Little research has been conduc…

We present the recent advances along with an error analysis of the IBM speaker recognition system for conversational speech. Some of the key advancements that contribute to our system include: a nearest-neighbor discriminant analysis (NDA) approach (as opposed to LDA) for intersession variability compensation in the i-…

Improved far-field speaker verification for short utterances in noisy conditions.

The paper develops a model for sovereign debt dynamics with explicit maturity structure.

Text-independent speaker recognition using short utterances is a highly challenging task due to the large variation and content mismatch between short utterances. I-vector based systems have become the standard in speaker verification applications, but they are less effective with short utterances. In this paper, we fi…

We extend the model of rational bubbles of Blanchard and of Blanchard and Watson to arbitrary dimensions d: a number d of market time series are made linearly interdependent via d times d stochastic coupling coefficients. We first show that the no-arbitrage condition imposes that the non-diagonal impacts of any asset i…

NIST's CTS Challenge evaluates speaker recognition using telephony data.