  In this paper, we address the problem of speaker verification in conditions
unseen or unknown during development. A standard method for speaker
verification consists of extracting speaker embeddings with a deep neural
network and processing them through a backend composed of probabilistic linear
discriminant analysis (PLDA) and global logistic regression score calibration.
This method is known to result in systems that work poorly on conditions
different from those used to train the calibration model. We propose to modify
the standard backend, introducing an adaptive calibrator that uses duration and
other automatically extracted side-information to adapt to the conditions of
the inputs. The backend is trained discriminatively to optimize binary
cross-entropy. When trained on a number of diverse datasets that are labeled
only with respect to speaker, the proposed backend consistently and, in some
cases, dramatically improves calibration, compared to the standard PLDA
approach, on a number of held-out datasets, some of which are markedly
different from the training data. Discrimination performance is also
consistently improved. We show that joint training of the PLDA and the adaptive
calibrator is essential -- the same benefits cannot be achieved when freezing
PLDA and fine-tuning the calibrator. To our knowledge, the results in this
paper are the first evidence in the literature that it is possible to develop a
speaker verification system with robust out-of-the-box performance on a large
variety of conditions.
