Flow-ER: A Flow-Based Embedding Regularization Strategy for Robust Speech Representation Learning

Over the recent years, various deep learning-based embedding methods were proposed. Although the deep learning-based embedding extraction methods have shown good performance in numerous tasks including speaker verification, language identification and anti-spoofing, their performance is limited when it comes to mismatched conditions due to the variability within them unrelated to the main task. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a novel training strategy that regularizes the embedding network to have minimum information about the nuisance attributes. To achieve this, our proposed method directly incorporates the information bottleneck scheme into the training process, where the mutual information is estimated using an auxiliary normalizing flow network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on different speech processing tasks and found to provide improvement over the standard training strategy in all experimentations.