Team HYU ASML ROBOVOX SP Cup 2024 System Description

This report describes the submission of HYU ASML team to the IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2024 (SP Cup 2024). This challenge, titled "ROBOVOX: Far-Field Speaker Recognition by a Mobile Robot," focuses on speaker recognition using a mobile robot in noisy and reverberant conditions. Our solution combines the result of deep residual neural networks and time-delay neural network-based speaker embedding models. These models were trained on a diverse dataset that includes French speech. To account for the challenging evaluation environment characterized by high noise, reverberation, and short speech conditions, we focused on data augmentation and training speech duration for the speaker embedding model. Our submission achieved second place on the SP Cup 2024 public leaderboard, with a detection cost function of 0.5245 and an equal error rate of 6.46%.

Improving Transformer-based End-to-End Speaker Diarization by Assigning Auxiliary Losses to Attention Heads

Transformer-based end-to-end neural speaker diarization (EEND) models utilize the multi-head self-attention (SA) mechanism to enable accurate speaker label prediction in overlapped speech regions. In this study, to enhance the training effectiveness of SA-EEND models, we propose the use of auxiliary losses for the SA heads of the transformer layers. Specifically, we assume that the attention weight matrices of an SA layer are redundant if their patterns are similar to those of the identity matrix. We then explicitly constrain such matrices to exhibit specific speaker activity patterns relevant to voice activity detection or overlapped speech detection tasks. Consequently, we expect the proposed auxiliary losses to guide the transformer layers to exhibit more diverse patterns in the attention weights, thereby reducing the assumed redundancies in the SA heads. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using the simulated and CALLHOME datasets for two-speaker diarization tasks, reducing the diarization error rate of the conventional SA-EEND model by 32.58% and 17.11%, respectively.