Variational domain adversarial learning for speaker verification

Abstract

Domain mismatch refers to the problem in which the distribution of training data differs from that of the test data. This paper proposes a variational domain adversarial neural network (VDANN), which consists of a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a domain adversarial neural network (DANN), to reduce domain mismatch. The DANN part aims to retain speaker identity information and learn a feature space that is robust against domain mismatch, while the VAE part is to impose variational regularization on the learned features so that they follow a Gaussian distribution. Thus, the representation produced by VDANN is not only speaker discriminative and domain-invariant but also Gaussian distributed, which is essential for the standard PLDA backend. Experiments on both SRE16 and SRE18-CMN2 show that VDANN outperforms the Kaldi baseline and the standard DANN. The results also suggest that VAE regularization is effective for domain adaptation.