# ASR is all you need: cross-modal distillation for lip reading

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 88 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [Learning Audio-Visual Speech Representation by Masked Multimodal Cluster Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02184/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Audio-visual Speech Recognition with Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06657/) (2021)
- [Auto-AVSR: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Automatic Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14307/) (2023)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Multiple Languages in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13084/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Video Forensics by Audio-Visual Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01767/) (2023)
- [LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08258/) (2021)
- [Sub-word Level Lip Reading With Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07603/) (2021)
- [Distilling Audio-Visual Knowledge by Compositional Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10955/) (2021)
- [Jointly Learning Visual and Auditory Speech Representations from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06246/) (2022)
- [There is More than Meets the Eye: Self-Supervised Multi-Object Detection and Tracking with Sound by Distilling Multimodal Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01353/) (2021)
- [LiRA: Learning Visual Speech Representations from Audio through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09171/) (2021)
- [The Modality Focusing Hypothesis: Towards Understanding Crossmodal Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06487/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Synchronisation in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04432/) (2021)
- [Distinguishing Homophenes Using Multi-Head Visual-Audio Memory for Lip Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01725/) (2022)
- [u-HuBERT: Unified Mixed-Modal Speech Pretraining And Zero-Shot Transfer to Unlabeled Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07036/) (2022)
- [MuAViC: A Multilingual Audio-Visual Corpus for Robust Speech Recognition and Robust Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00628/) (2023)
- [VATLM: Visual-Audio-Text Pre-Training with Unified Masked Prediction for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11275/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Video Front-Ends for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Single and Multi-Person Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10439/) (2022)
- [XKD: Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13929/) (2022)
- [Where Visual Speech Meets Language: VSP-LLM Framework for Efficient and Context-Aware Visual Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15151/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised object detection from audio-visual correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06401/) (2021)
- [Audio-visual Generalised Zero-shot Learning with Cross-modal Attention and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03598/) (2022)
- [AV-data2vec: Self-supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Speech Representations with Contextualized Target Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06419/) (2023)
- [Audio-Visual Efficient Conformer for Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01456/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Visual Speech Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10839/) (2022)
- [SynthVSR: Scaling Up Visual Speech Recognition With Synthetic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17200/) (2023)
- [BRAVEn: Improving Self-Supervised Pre-training for Visual and Auditory Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02098/) (2024)
- [Temporal and cross-modal attention for audio-visual zero-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09966/) (2022)
- [Multi-modality Associative Bridging through Memory: Speech Sound Recollected from Face Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01265/) (2022)
- [Speaker-adaptive Lip Reading with User-dependent Padding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04498/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this work is to train strong models for visual speech recognition without requiring human annotated ground truth data. We achieve this by distilling from an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model that has been trained on a large-scale audio-only corpus. We use a cross-modal distillation method that combines Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) with a frame-wise cross-entropy loss. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) we show that ground truth transcriptions are not necessary to train a lip reading system; (ii) we show how arbitrary amounts of unlabelled video data can be leveraged to improve performance; (iii) we demonstrate that distillation significantly speeds up training; and, (iv) we obtain state-of-the-art results on the challenging LRS2 and LRS3 datasets for training only on publicly available data.