Adversarially Learned Total Variability Embedding for Speaker Recognition with Random Digit Strings

Over the recent years, various research has been conducted to investigate methods for verifying users with a short randomized pass-phrase due to the increasing demand for voice-based authentication systems. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for extracting an i-vector-like feature based on an adversarially learned inference (ALI) model which summarizes the variability within the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) distribution through a nonlinear process. Analogous to the previously proposed variational autoencoder (VAE)-based feature extractor, the proposed ALI-based model is trained to generate the GMM supervector according to the maximum likelihood criterion given the Baum–Welch statistics of the input utterance. However, to prevent the potential loss of information caused by the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KL divergence) regularization adopted in the VAE-based model training, the newly proposed ALI-based feature extractor exploits a joint discriminator to ensure that the generated latent variable and the GMM supervector are more realistic. The proposed framework is compared with the conventional i-vector and VAE-based methods using the TIDIGITS dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method can represent the uncertainty caused by the short duration better than the VAE-based method. Furthermore, the proposed approach has shown great performance when applied in association with the standard i-vector framework.