An efficient clustering algorithm for self-supervised speaker recognition

Clustering-based pseudo-labels (PLs) are widely used to optimize speaker embedding (SE) networks and train self-supervised speaker verification (SV) systems. However, PL-based self-supervised training depends on high-quality PLs and clustering performance relies heavily on time- and resource-consuming data augmentation regularization. In this paper, we propose an efficient and general-purpose multi-objective clustering algorithm that outperforms all other baselines used to cluster SEs.Our approach avoids explicit data augmentation for fast training and low memory and compute resource usage. It is based on three principles: (1) Self-Augmented Training to enforce representation invariance and maximize the information-theoretic dependency between samples and their predicted PLs (2) Virtual Mixup Training to impose local-Lipschitzness and enforce the cluster assumption (3) Supervised contrastive learning to learn more discriminative features and pull samples of same class together and push apart samples of different clusters, while improving robustness to natural corruptions. We provide a thorough comparative analysis of the performance of our clustering method vs. baselines using a variety of clustering metrics and show that we outperform all other clustering benchmarks, perform an ablation study to analyze the contribution of each component including two other augmentation-based objectives, and show that our multi-objective approach provides beneficial complementary information. Moreover, using the generated PLs to train our SE system allows us to achieve state-of-the-art SV performance.