# Target Speaker Lipreading by Audio-Visual Self-Distillation Pretraining and Speaker Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05758/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Speech and audio distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 43 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Speech and audio distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/speech-and-audio-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Cooperative Learning of Audio and Video Models from Self-Supervised Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00230/) (2018)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Audio-visual Speech Recognition with Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06657/) (2021)
- [Lipreading using Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08702/) (2020)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Multiple Languages in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13084/) (2022)
- [Branchformer: Parallel MLP-Attention Architectures to Capture Local and Global Context for Speech Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02971/) (2022)
- [ASR is all you need: cross-modal distillation for lip reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12747/) (2019)
- [Recurrent Neural Network Transducer for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04890/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06424/) (2018)
- [Combining Residual Networks with LSTMs for Lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04105/) (2017)
- [Audio-Visual Speech Recognition With A Hybrid CTC/Attention Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00108/) (2018)
- [Sub-word Level Lip Reading With Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07603/) (2021)
- [Discriminative Multi-modality Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05592/) (2020)
- [Jointly Learning Visual and Auditory Speech Representations from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06246/) (2022)
- [Towards Practical Lipreading with Distilled and Efficient Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06504/) (2020)
- [LiRA: Learning Visual Speech Representations from Audio through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09171/) (2021)
- [Learning Hidden Unit Contributions for Unsupervised Acoustic Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02828/) (2016)
- [u-HuBERT: Unified Mixed-Modal Speech Pretraining And Zero-Shot Transfer to Unlabeled Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07036/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Can We Read Speech Beyond the Lips? Rethinking RoI Selection for Deep Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03206/) (2020)
- [AV-data2vec: Self-supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Speech Representations with Contextualized Target Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06419/) (2023)
- [Training Strategies for Improved Lip-reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01383/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LTA-L2S: Lexical Tone-Aware Lip-to-Speech Synthesis for Mandarin with Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25670/) (2025)
- [Learning Visual Speech Representations via Cross-Modal Distillation and Joint Face-Lip Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19559/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lipreading is an important technique for facilitating human-computer interaction in noisy environments. Our previously developed self-supervised learning method, AV2vec, which leverages multimodal self-distillation, has demonstrated promising performance in speaker-independent lipreading on the English LRS3 dataset. However, AV2vec faces challenges such as high training costs and a potential scarcity of audio-visual data for lipreading in languages other than English, such as Chinese. Additionally, most studies concentrate on speakerindependent lipreading models, which struggle to account for the substantial variation in speaking styles across di?erent speakers. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive approach. First, we investigate cross-lingual transfer learning, adapting a pre-trained AV2vec model from a source language and optimizing it for the lipreading task in a target language. Second, we enhance the accuracy of lipreading for specific target speakers through a speaker adaptation strategy, which is not extensively explored in previous research. Third, after analyzing the complementary performance of lipreading with lip region-of-interest (ROI) and face inputs, we introduce a model ensembling strategy that integrates both, signi?cantly boosting model performance. Our method achieved a character error rate (CER) of 77.3% on the evaluation set of the ChatCLR dataset, which is lower than the top result from the 2024 Chat-scenario Chinese Lipreading Challenge.