# Phoneme-Level Visual Speech Recognition via Point-Visual Fusion and Language Model Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18863/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (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)
- [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)
- [ASR is all you need: cross-modal distillation for lip reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12747/) (2019)
- [LipNet: End-to-End Sentence-level Lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01599/) (2016)
- [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)
- [LRW-1000: A Naturally-Distributed Large-Scale Benchmark for Lip Reading in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06990/) (2018)
- [Distinguishing Homophenes Using Multi-Head Visual-Audio Memory for Lip Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01725/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Video Front-Ends for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Single and Multi-Person Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10439/) (2022)
- [Where Visual Speech Meets Language: VSP-LLM Framework for Efficient and Context-Aware Visual Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15151/) (2024)
- [SynthVSR: Scaling Up Visual Speech Recognition With Synthetic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17200/) (2023)
- [SoundChoice: Grapheme-to-Phoneme Models with Semantic Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13703/) (2022)
- [Lip2Vec: Efficient and Robust Visual Speech Recognition via Latent-to-Latent Visual to Audio Representation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06112/) (2023)
- [VALLR: Visual ASR Language Model for Lip Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21408/) (2025)
- [A Chat About Boring Problems: Studying GPT-based text normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13426/) (2023)
- [LiteVSR: Efficient Visual Speech Recognition by Learning from Speech Representations of Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09727/) (2023)
- [Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16071/) (2024)
- [Personalized Lip Reading: Adapting to Your Unique Lip Movements with Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00986/) (2024)
- [Bring the Noise: Introducing Noise Robustness to Pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02145/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Visemes for Better Visual Speech Representation and Lip Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10157/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [The Lipreading Gap: Do VSR Models Perceive Visual Speech Like Human Lipreaders?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07435/) (2026)
- [VALLR-Pin: Uncertainty-Factorized Visual Speech Recognition for Mandarin with Pinyin Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20032/) (2025)
- [Head-Pose-Aware Visual Speech Recognition with FiLM Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00751/) (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)
- [Curriculum-Based Noise Adaptation for Phoneme-to-Text Reconstruction in Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20839/) (2026)
- [Pose Adaptive Dynamic FiLM Modulation for Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29443/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Automatic Speech Recognition (V-ASR) is a challenging task that involves interpreting spoken language solely from visual information, such as lip movements and facial expressions. This task is notably challenging due to the absence of auditory cues and the visual ambiguity of phonemes that exhibit similar visemes-distinct sounds that appear identical in lip motions. Existing methods often aim to predict words or characters directly from visual cues, but they commonly suffer from high error rates due to viseme ambiguity and require large amounts of pre-training data. We propose a novel phoneme-based two-stage framework that fuses visual and landmark motion features, followed by an LLM model for word reconstruction to address these challenges. Stage 1 consists of V-ASR, which outputs the predicted phonemes, thereby reducing training complexity. Meanwhile, the facial landmark features address speaker-specific facial characteristics. Stage 2 comprises an encoder-decoder LLM model, NLLB, that reconstructs the output phonemes back to words. Besides using a large visual dataset for deep learning fine-tuning, our PV-ASR method demonstrates superior performance by achieving 17.4% WER on the LRS2 and 21.0% WER on the LRS3 dataset.