  Probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) is a popular normalization
approach for the i-vector model, and has delivered state-of-the-art performance
in speaker recognition. A potential problem of the PLDA model, however, is that
it essentially assumes Gaussian distributions over speaker vectors, which is
not always true in practice. Additionally, the objective function is not
directly related to the goal of the task, e.g., discriminating true speakers
and imposters. In this paper, we propose a max-margin metric learning approach
to solve the problems. It learns a linear transform with a criterion that the
margin between target and imposter trials are maximized. Experiments conducted
on the SRE08 core test show that compared to PLDA, the new approach can obtain
comparable or even better performance, though the scoring is simply a cosine
computation.
