  The state-of-art approach for speaker verification consists of a neural
network based embedding extractor along with a backend generative model such as
the Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA). In this work, we propose
a neural network approach for backend modeling in speaker recognition. The
likelihood ratio score of the generative PLDA model is posed as a
discriminative similarity function and the learnable parameters of the score
function are optimized using a verification cost. The proposed model, termed as
neural PLDA (NPLDA), is initialized using the generative PLDA model parameters.
The loss function for the NPLDA model is an approximation of the minimum
detection cost function (DCF). The speaker recognition experiments using the
NPLDA model are performed on the speaker verificiation task in the VOiCES
datasets as well as the SITW challenge dataset. In these experiments, the NPLDA
model optimized using the proposed loss function improves significantly over
the state-of-art PLDA based speaker verification system.
