Margin-mixup: a method for robust speaker verification in multi-speaker audio

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the task of speaker verification on audio with multiple overlapping speakers. Most speaker verification systems are designed with the assumption of a single speaker being present in a given audio segment. However, in a real-world setting this assumption does not always hold. In this paper, we demonstrate that current speaker verification systems are not robust against audio with noticeable speaker overlap. To alleviate this issue, we propose margin-mixup, a simple training strategy that can easily be adopted by existing speaker verification pipelines to make the resulting speaker embeddings robust against multi-speaker audio. In contrast to other methods, margin-mixup requires no alterations to regular speaker verification architectures, while attaining better results. On our multi-speaker test set based on VoxCeleb1, the proposed margin-mixup strategy improves the EER on average with 44.4% relative to our state-of-the-art speaker verification baseline systems.