Self-supervised Reflective Learning through Self-distillation and Online Clustering for Speaker Representation Learning

Danwei Cai, Zexin Cai, Ming Li

Abstract: Speaker representation learning is crucial for voice recognition systems, with recent advances in self-supervised approaches reducing dependency on labeled data. Current two-stage iterative frameworks, while effective, suffer from significant computational overhead due to repeated rounds of clustering and training. They also struggle with noisy pseudo labels that can impair model learning. This paper introduces self-supervised reflective learning (SSRL), an improved framework that addresses these limitations by enabling continuous refinement of pseudo labels during training. Through a teacher-student architecture and online clustering mechanism, SSRL eliminates the need for iterative training rounds. To handle label noise, we incorporate noisy label modeling and pseudo label queues that maintain temporal consistency. Experiments on VoxCeleb show SSRL's superiority over current two-stage iterative approaches, surpassing the performance of a 5-round method in just a single training round. Ablation studies validate the contributions of key components like noisy label modeling and pseudo label queues. Moreover, consistent improvements in pseudo labeling and the convergence of cluster counts demonstrate SSRL's effectiveness in deciphering unlabeled data. This work marks an important advancement in efficient and accurate self-supervised speaker representation learning through the novel reflective learning paradigm.