# End-to-End Neural Speaker Diarization with Self-attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 77 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [A Review of Speaker Diarization: Recent Advances with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09624/) (2021)
- [Powerset multi-class cross entropy loss for neural speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13025/) (2023)
- [Talking Turns: Benchmarking Audio Foundation Models on Turn-Taking Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01174/) (2025)
- [Transcribe-to-Diarize: Neural Speaker Diarization for Unlimited Number of Speakers using End-to-End Speaker-Attributed ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03151/) (2021)
- [The CHiME-7 DASR Challenge: Distant Meeting Transcription with Multiple Devices in Diverse Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13734/) (2023)
- [SpeakerLM: End-to-End Versatile Speaker Diarization and Recognition with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06372/) (2025)
- [Towards Neural Diarization for Unlimited Numbers of Speakers Using Global and Local Attractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01545/) (2021)
- [Sortformer: A Novel Approach for Permutation-Resolved Speaker Supervision in Speech-to-Text Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06656/) (2024)
- [BERTraffic: BERT-based Joint Speaker Role and Speaker Change Detection for Air Traffic Control Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05781/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Neural Diarization: From Transformer to Conformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07167/) (2021)
- [Multi-scale Speaker Diarization with Dynamic Scale Weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15974/) (2022)
- [Generating Data with Text-to-Speech and Large-Language Models for Conversational Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09215/) (2024)
- [The Hitachi-JHU DIHARD III System: Competitive End-to-End Neural Diarization and X-Vector Clustering Systems Combined by DOVER-Lap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01363/) (2021)
- [Online Neural Diarization of Unlimited Numbers of Speakers Using Global and Local Attractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02432/) (2022)
- [LLM-based speaker diarization correction: A generalizable approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04927/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Diarization for Variable Number of Speakers with Local-Global Networks and Discriminative Speaker Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02096/) (2021)
- [Multi-scale speaker embedding-based graph attention networks for speaker diarisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03361/) (2021)
- [Improving the Naturalness of Simulated Conversations for End-to-End Neural Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11232/) (2022)
- [Target Speaker Voice Activity Detection with Transformers and Its Integration with End-to-End Neural Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13085/) (2022)
- [Supervised Hierarchical Clustering using Graph Neural Networks for Speaker Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12716/) (2023)
- [Unified Modeling of Multi-Talker Overlapped Speech Recognition and Diarization with a Sidecar Separator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16263/) (2023)
- [Efficient and Robust Speaker Diarization via Structured Pruning of Self-Supervised Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18623/) (2025)
- [DIVE: End-to-end Speech Diarization via Iterative Speaker Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13802/) (2021)
- [A Comparative Study on Speaker-attributed Automatic Speech Recognition in Multi-party Meetings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16834/) (2022)
- [Exploring Speaker-Related Information in Spoken Language Understanding for Better Speaker Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12927/) (2023)
- [TagSpeech: End-to-End Multi-Speaker ASR and Diarization with Fine-Grained Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06896/) (2026)
- [ASR-Aware End-to-end Neural Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01286/) (2022)
- [Mamba-based Segmentation Model for Speaker Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06459/) (2024)
- [MOSS Transcribe Diarize Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01554/) (2026)
- [Contrastive Separative Coding for Self-supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00816/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speaker diarization has been mainly developed based on the clustering of speaker embeddings. However, the clustering-based approach has two major problems; i.e., (i) it is not optimized to minimize diarization errors directly, and (ii) it cannot handle speaker overlaps correctly. To solve these problems, the End-to-End Neural Diarization (EEND), in which a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network directly outputs speaker diarization results given a multi-talker recording, was recently proposed. In this study, we enhance EEND by introducing self-attention blocks instead of BLSTM blocks. In contrast to BLSTM, which is conditioned only on its previous and next hidden states, self-attention is directly conditioned on all the other frames, making it much suitable for dealing with the speaker diarization problem. We evaluated our proposed method on simulated mixtures, real telephone calls, and real dialogue recordings. The experimental results revealed that the self-attention was the key to achieving good performance and that our proposed method performed significantly better than the conventional BLSTM-based method. Our method was even better than that of the state-of-the-art x-vector clustering-based method. Finally, by visualizing the latent representation, we show that the self-attention can capture global speaker characteristics in addition to local speech activity dynamics. Our source code is available online at https://github.com/hitachi-speech/EEND.