# Purification Before Fusion: Toward Mask-Free Speech Enhancement for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12436/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Attention Bottlenecks for Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00135/) (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)
- [End-to-end Audio-visual Speech Recognition with Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06657/) (2021)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Multiple Languages in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13084/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Watch or Listen: Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Visual Corruption Modeling and Reliability Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08536/) (2023)
- [Visual Context-driven Audio Feature Enhancement for Robust End-to-End Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06020/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Efficient Conformer for Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01456/) (2023)
- [Attention-based Audio-Visual Fusion for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01728/) (2018)
- [MLCA-AVSR: Multi-Layer Cross Attention Fusion based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03424/) (2024)
- [How to Teach DNNs to Pay Attention to the Visual Modality in Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08250/) (2020)
- [Attentive Fusion Enhanced Audio-Visual Encoding for Transformer Based Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02686/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) typically improves recognition accuracy in noisy environments by integrating noise-immune visual cues with audio signals. Nevertheless, high-noise audio inputs are prone to introducing adverse interference into the feature fusion process. To mitigate this, recent AVSR methods often adopt mask-based strategies to filter audio noise during feature interaction and fusion, yet such methods risk discarding semantically relevant information alongside noise. In this work, we propose an end-to-end noise-robust AVSR framework coupled with speech enhancement, eliminating the need for explicit noise mask generation. This framework leverages a Conformer-based bottleneck fusion module to implicitly refine noisy audio features with video assistance. By reducing modality redundancy and enhancing inter-modal interactions, our method preserves speech semantic integrity to achieve robust recognition performance. Experimental evaluations on the public LRS3 benchmark suggest that our method outperforms prior advanced mask-based baselines under noisy conditions.