Variational Autoencoders with implicit priors for short-duration text-independent speaker verification

Anonymous

Abstract: In this work, we exploited different strategies to provide prior knowledge to commonly used generative modeling approaches aiming to obtain speaker-dependent low dimensional representations from short-duration segments of speech data, making use of available information of speaker identities. Namely, convolutional variational autoencoders are employed, and statistics of its learned posterior distribution are used as low dimensional representations of fixed length short-duration utterances. In order to enforce speaker dependency in the latent layer, we introduced a variation of the commonly used prior within the variational autoencoders framework, i.e. the model is simultaneously trained for reconstruction of inputs along with a discriminative task performed on top of latent layers outputs. The effectiveness of both triplet loss minimization and speaker recognition are evaluated as implicit priors on the challenging cross-language NIST SRE 2016 setting and compared against fully supervised and unsupervised baselines.

TL;DR: We evaluate the effectiveness of having auxiliary discriminative tasks performed on top of statistics of the posterior distribution learned by variational autoencoders to enforce speaker dependency.

Keywords: Speaker verification, Variational autoencoders