Xi+: Uncertainty Supervision for Robust Speaker Embedding

Abstract: There are various factors that can influence the performance of speaker recognition systems, such as emotion, language and other speaker-related or context-related variations. Since individual speech frames do not contribute equally to the utterance-level representation, it is essential to estimate the importance or reliability of each frame. The xi-vector model addresses this by assigning different weights to frames based on uncertainty estimation. However, its uncertainty estimation model is implicitly trained through classification loss alone and does not consider the temporal relationships between frames, which may lead to suboptimal supervision. In this paper, we propose an improved architecture, xi+. Compared to xi-vector, xi+ incorporates a temporal attention module to capture frame-level uncertainty in a context-aware manner. In addition, we introduce a novel loss function, Stochastic Variance Loss, which explicitly supervises the learning of uncertainty. Results demonstrate consistent performance improvements of about 10\% on the VoxCeleb1-O set and 11\% on the NIST SRE 2024 evaluation set.