Discriminative multi-domain PLDA for speaker verification

Domain mismatch occurs when data from application-specific target domain is related to, but cannot be viewed as iid samples from the source domain used for training speaker models. Another problem occurs when several training datasets are available but their domains differ. In this case training on simply merged subsets can lead to suboptimal performance. Existing approaches to cope with these problems employ generative modeling and consist of several separate stages such as training and adaptation. In this work we explore a discriminative approach which naturally incorporates both scenarios in a principled way. To this end, we develop a method that can learn across multiple domains by extending discriminative probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) according to multi-task learning paradigm. Our results on the recent JHU Domain Adaptation Challenge (DAC) dataset demonstrate that the proposed multi-task PLDA decreases equal error rate (EER) of the PLDA without domain compensation by more than 35% relative and performs comparable to another competitive domain compensation technique.