Speaker identification systems in a real-world scenario are tasked to identify a speaker amongst a set of enrolled speakers given just a few samples for each enrolled speaker. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of meta-learning and relation networks for this use case. We propose improved relation networks for speaker verification and few-shot (unseen) speaker identification. The use of relation networks facilitates joint training of the frontend speaker encoder and the backend model. Inspired by the use of prototypical networks in speaker verification and to increase the discriminability of the speaker embeddings, we train the model to classify samples in the current episode amongst all speakers present in the training set. Furthermore, we propose a new training regime for faster model convergence by extracting more information from a given meta-learning episode with negligible extra computation. We evaluate the proposed techniques on VoxCeleb, SITW and VCTK datasets on the tasks of speaker verification and unseen speaker identification. The proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches consistently on both tasks.

Few-shot learning (FSL) is a central problem in meta-learning, where learners must quickly adapt to new tasks given limited training data. Surprisingly, recent works have outperformed meta-learning methods tailored to FSL by casting it as standard supervised learning to jointly classify all classes shared across tasks. However, this approach violates the standard FSL setting by requiring global labels shared across tasks, which are often unavailable in practice. In this paper, we show why solving FSL via standard classification is theoretically advantageous. This motivates us to propose Meta Label Learning (MeLa), a novel algorithm that infers global labels and obtains robust few-shot models via standard classification. Empirically, we demonstrate that MeLa outperforms meta-learning competitors and is comparable to the oracle setting where ground truth labels are given. We provide extensive ablation studies to highlight the key properties of the proposed strategy.

Hierarchical multi-label text classification(HMTC) problems become popular recently because of its practicality. Most existing algorithms for HMTC focus on the design of classifiers, and are largely referred to as local, global, or a combination of local/global approaches. However, a few studies have started exploring hierarchical feature extraction based on the label hierarchy associating with text in HMTC. In this paper, a \textbf{N}eural network-based method called \textbf{LA-HCN} is proposed where a novel \textbf{L}abel-based \textbf{A}ttention module is designed to hierarchically extract important information from the text based on different labels. Besides, local and global document embeddings are separately generated to support the respective local and global classifications. In our experiments, LA-HCN achieves the top performance on the four public HMTC datasets when compared with other neural network-based state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparison between LA-HCN with its variants also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed label-based attention module as well as the use of the combination of local and global classifications. By visualizing the learned attention(words), we find LA-HCN is able to extract meaningful but different information from text based on different labels which is helpful for human understanding and explanation of classification results.

In realistic settings, a speaker recognition system needs to identify a speaker given a short utterance, while the utterance used to enroll may be relatively long. However, existing speaker recognition models perform poorly with such short utterances. To solve this problem, we introduce a meta-learning scheme with imbalance length pairs. Specifically, we use a prototypical network and train it with a support set of long utterances and a query set of short utterances. However, since optimizing for only the classes in the given episode is not sufficient to learn discriminative embeddings for other classes in the entire dataset, we additionally classify both support set and query set against the entire classes in the training set to learn a well-discriminated embedding space. By combining these two learning schemes, our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art speaker verification models learned in a standard supervised learning framework on short utterance (1-2 seconds) on VoxCeleb dataset. We also validate our proposed model for unseen speaker identification, on which it also achieves significant gain over existing approaches.