Self-Supervised Adaptive AV Fusion Module for Pre-Trained ASR Models

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has reached a level of accuracy in recent years, that even outperforms humans in transcribing speech to text. Nevertheless, all current ASR approaches show a certain weakness against ambient noise. To reduce this weakness, audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) approaches additionally consider visual information from lip movements for transcription. This additional modality increases the computational cost for training models from scratch. We propose an approach, that builds on a pre-trained ASR model and extends it with an adaptive upstream module, that fuses audio and visual information. Since we do not need to train the transformer structure from scratch, our approach requires a fraction of the computational resources compared to traditional AVSR models. Compared to current SOTA systems like AV-HuBERT, our approach achieves an average improvement of 8.3% in word error rate across different model sizes, noise categories and broad SNR range. The approach allows up to 21% smaller models and requires only a fraction of the computational resources for training and inference compared to common AVSR approaches.