TCG CREST System Description for the DISPLACE-M Challenge

This report presents the TCG CREST system description for Track 1 (Speaker Diarization) of the DISPLACE-M challenge, focusing on naturalistic medical conversations in noisy rural-healthcare scenarios. Our study evaluates the impact of various voice activity detection (VAD) methods and advanced clustering algorithms on overall speaker diarization (SD) performance. We compare and analyze two SD frameworks: a modular pipeline utilizing SpeechBrain with ECAPA-TDNN embeddings, and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) hybrid end-to-end neural diarization system, Diarizen, built on top of a pre-trained WavLM. With these frameworks, we explore diverse clustering techniques, including agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC), and multiple novel variants of spectral clustering, such as SC-adapt, SC-PNA, and SC-MK. Experimental results demonstrate that the Diarizen system provides an approximate $39\%$ relative improvement in the diarization error rate (DER) on the post-evaluation analysis of Phase~I compared to the SpeechBrain baseline. Our best-performing submitted system employing the Diarizen baseline with AHC employing a median filtering with a larger context window of $29$ achieved a DER of 10.37\% on the development and 9.21\% on the evaluation sets, respectively. Our team ranked sixth out of the 11 participating teams after the Phase~I evaluation.

MK-SGC-SC: Multiple Kernel Guided Sparse Graph Construction in Spectral Clustering for Unsupervised Speaker Diarization

Speaker diarization aims to segment audio recordings into regions corresponding to individual speakers. Although unsupervised speaker diarization is inherently challenging, the prospect of identifying speaker regions without pretraining or weak supervision motivates research on clustering techniques. In this work, we share the notable observation that measuring multiple kernel similarities of speaker embeddings to thereafter craft a sparse graph for spectral clustering in a principled manner is sufficient to achieve state-of-the-art performances in a fully unsupervised setting. Specifically, we consider four polynomial kernels and a degree one arccosine kernel to measure similarities in speaker embeddings, using which sparse graphs are constructed in a principled manner to emphasize local similarities. Experiments show the proposed approach excels in unsupervised speaker diarization over a variety of challenging environments in the DIHARD-III, AMI, and VoxConverse corpora. To encourage further research, our implementations are available at https://github.com/nikhilraghav29/MK-SGC-SC.

Assessing the Robustness of Spectral Clustering for Deep Speaker Diarization

Clustering speaker embeddings is crucial in speaker diarization but hasn't received as much focus as other components. Moreover, the robustness of speaker diarization across various datasets hasn't been explored when the development and evaluation data are from different domains. To bridge this gap, this study thoroughly examines spectral clustering for both same-domain and cross-domain speaker diarization. Our extensive experiments on two widely used corpora, AMI and DIHARD, reveal the performance trend of speaker diarization in the presence of domain mismatch. We observe that the performance difference between two different domain conditions can be attributed to the role of spectral clustering. In particular, keeping other modules unchanged, we show that differences in optimal tuning parameters as well as speaker count estimation originates due to the mismatch. This study opens several future directions for speaker diarization research.