# Attention-Guided Reliability Scaling for Contrastive Decoding in Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26213 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26213/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Auto-AVSR: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Automatic Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14307/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Decoding Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09117/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Strong Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12319/) (2024)
- [AdaCAD: Adaptively Decoding to Balance Conflicts between Contextual and Parametric Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07394/) (2024)
- [Whisper-Flamingo: Integrating Visual Features into Whisper for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10082/) (2024)
- [Visual Context-driven Audio Feature Enhancement for Robust End-to-End Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06020/) (2022)
- [Reducing Object Hallucination in Large Audio-Language Models via Audio-Aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07233/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Modality-specific Representations for Audio-visual Speech Recognition via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05301/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Contrastive Decoding in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Handling Noisy Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01084/) (2024)
- [MMS-LLaMA: Efficient LLM-based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Minimal Multimodal Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11315/) (2025)
- [Unified Speech Recognition: A Single Model for Auditory, Visual, and Audiovisual Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02256/) (2024)
- [Modality Attention for End-to-End Audio-visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05250/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Audio-Visual Speech Recognition via Matryoshka-Based Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06362/) (2025)
- [Learning Video Temporal Dynamics with Cross-Modal Attention for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03563/) (2024)
- [Omni-AVSR: Towards Unified Multimodal Speech Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07253/) (2025)
- [Identifying and Calibrating Overconfidence in Noisy Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07195/) (2025)
- [Improving Noise Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition via Router-Gated Cross-Modal Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18734/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM)-based audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) systems are robust under noise. Contrastive decoding (CD), originally introduced to stabilize LLM generation by contrasting a weaker model against a stronger one at inference time, adjusts predictions without additional training. In this work, we apply CD to AVSR by contrasting audio-only conditioning with full audio-visual conditioning within the same underlying model. However, using a fixed contrastive strength introduces a trade-off across noise levels: stronger intervention helps under severe noise but may over-correct reliable predictions in clean conditions. We propose reliability-aware scaling of CD for AVSR. Instead of using a fixed strength, we adaptively modulate the contrastive influence at each token based on reliability signals derived from attention dynamics and inter-model predictive divergence. Experiments on LRS3 show consistent improvements across clean and low-SNR conditions.