# Lip Reading for Low-resource Languages by Learning and Combining General Speech Knowledge and Language-specific Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [Deep Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02108/) (2018)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Speech Representation by Masked Multimodal Cluster Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02184/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [MMS-LLaMA: Efficient LLM-based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Minimal Multimodal Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11315/) (2025)
- [AV2AV: Direct Audio-Visual Speech to Audio-Visual Speech Translation with Unified Audio-Visual Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02512/) (2023)
- [SyncVSR: Data-Efficient Visual Speech Recognition with End-to-End Crossmodal Audio Token Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12233/) (2024)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Languages with Limited Labeled Data using Automatic Labels from Whisper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08535/) (2023)
- [Zero-AVSR: Zero-Shot Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with LLMs by Learning Language-Agnostic Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06273/) (2025)
- [Efficient Training for Multilingual Visual Speech Recognition: Pre-training with Discretized Visual Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09802/) (2024)
- [Personalized Lip Reading: Adapting to Your Unique Lip Movements with Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00986/) (2024)
- [Towards Practical and Efficient Image-to-Speech Captioning with Vision-Language Pre-training and Multi-modal Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08531/) (2023)
- [mWhisper-Flamingo for Multilingual Audio-Visual Noise-Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01547/) (2025)
- [Large Multimodal Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05568/) (2025)
- [Tailored Design of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Models using Branchformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06606/) (2024)
- [Towards Inclusive Communication: A Unified Framework for Generating Spoken Language from Sign, Lip, and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20476/) (2025)
- [Evaluation of End-to-End Continuous Spanish Lipreading in Different Data Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00464/) (2025)
- [Learning Speaker-Invariant Visual Features for Lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07572/) (2025)
- [TD3Net: A temporal densely connected multi-dilated convolutional network for lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16073/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Large Language Models for Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28456/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel lip reading framework, especially for low-resource languages, which has not been well addressed in the previous literature. Since low-resource languages do not have enough video-text paired data to train the model to have sufficient power to model lip movements and language, it is regarded as challenging to develop lip reading models for low-resource languages. In order to mitigate the challenge, we try to learn general speech knowledge, the ability to model lip movements, from a high-resource language through the prediction of speech units. It is known that different languages partially share common phonemes, thus general speech knowledge learned from one language can be extended to other languages. Then, we try to learn language-specific knowledge, the ability to model language, by proposing Language-specific Memory-augmented Decoder (LMDecoder). LMDecoder saves language-specific audio features into memory banks and can be trained on audio-text paired data which is more easily accessible than video-text paired data. Therefore, with LMDecoder, we can transform the input speech units into language-specific audio features and translate them into texts by utilizing the learned rich language knowledge. Finally, by combining general speech knowledge and language-specific knowledge, we can efficiently develop lip reading models even for low-resource languages. Through extensive experiments using five languages, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated.