# Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge Evaluation Plan

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17913 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17913/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Learnable PINs: Cross-Modal Embeddings for Person Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00833/) (2018)
- [Utterance-level Aggregation For Speaker Recognition In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10107/) (2019)
- [Fusion and Orthogonal Projection for Improved Face-Voice Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10483/) (2021)
- [Cross-modal Speaker Verification and Recognition: A Multilingual Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13780/) (2020)
- [Deep Latent Space Learning for Cross-modal Mapping of Audio and Visual Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08685/) (2019)
- [Single-branch Network for Multimodal Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06129/) (2023)
- [PAEFF: Precise Alignment and Enhanced Gated Feature Fusion for Face-Voice Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17002/) (2025)
- [Linking Faces and Voices Across Languages: Insights from the FAME 2026 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20376/) (2025)
- [Face-Voice Association with Inductive Bias for Maximum Class Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13651/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face--voice association models may rely on language or gender cues in the voice rather than on speaker-specific voice characteristics, which can lead to a performance deterioration when the model has to identify a multilingual speaker or distinguis same-gender speakers. To investigate these issues, we introduce the Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge. The challenge formulates face--voice association as a cross-modal verification task: given a voice, identify the speaker's face from a ``gallery'' of faces consisting of the speaker's face and a set of negative samples. Models are evaluated on identities not present in the training data (``unseen'') and both for languages present or absent from the training data (``heard'' and ``unheard''). Two evaluation settings are used to test models' reliance on gender: a standard, unconstrained and a gender-constrained one, where the latter uses a same-gender gallery. The performance of existing, baseline models in these settings reveals that models performance degrades under language shifts and in gender-constrained settings, highlighting the need to foster the development of models that capture identity-specific aspects beyond language and gender. The challenge provides a benchmark dataset, pretrained baseline models, and an evaluation framework to advance face--voice association.