# Uncovering the Visual Contribution in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Visual Cues Support Robust Turn-taking Prediction in Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22088/) (2025)
- [The Lipreading Gap: Do VSR Models Perceive Visual Speech Like Human Lipreaders?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07435/) (2026)
- [Improving Noise Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition via Router-Gated Cross-Modal Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18734/) (2025)
- [Dr. SHAP-AV: Decoding Relative Modality Contributions via Shapley Attribution in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12046/) (2026)
- [AVSRBench: A Multi-Condition AVSR Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10366/) (2026)
- [Candor-LR: A Dyadic Conversational Dataset for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10394/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) combines auditory and visual speech cues to enhance the accuracy and robustness of speech recognition systems. Recent advancements in AVSR have improved performance in noisy environments compared to audio-only counterparts. However, the true extent of the visual contribution, and whether AVSR systems fully exploit the available cues in the visual domain, remains unclear. This paper assesses AVSR systems from a different perspective, by considering human speech perception. We use three systems: Auto-AVSR, AVEC and AV-RelScore. We first quantify the visual contribution using effective SNR gains at 0 dB and then investigate the use of visual information in terms of its temporal distribution and word-level informativeness. We show that low WER does not guarantee high SNR gains. Our results suggest that current methods do not fully exploit visual information, and we recommend future research to report effective SNR gains alongside WERs.