# Improving Audiovisual Speech Recognition through Synthetic Visual Data Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31961 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31961/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [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 Attention-based Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04395/) (2015)
- [A Close Look at Deep Learning with Small Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12843/) (2020)
- [MuAViC: A Multilingual Audio-Visual Corpus for Robust Speech Recognition and Robust Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00628/) (2023)
- [CI-AVSR: A Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Dataset for In-car Command Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03804/) (2022)
- [LIP-RTVE: An Audiovisual Database for Continuous Spanish in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12457/) (2023)
- [Multichannel AV-wav2vec2: A Framework for Learning Multichannel Multi-Modal Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03468/) (2024)
- [Towards MOOCs for Lipreading: Using Synthetic Talking Heads to Train Humans in Lipreading at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09796/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audiovisual Speech Recognition (AVSR) is a multimodal approach to speech recognition that incorporates visual information from lip movements to enhance model performance. Despite its advantages, its development remains constrained by the limited availability of labeled audiovisual (AV) datasets. This work explores the use of synthetic visual data as a solution, using an audio-driven talking-head pipeline to generate lip-synchronized visual content from existing audio data. We evaluate the effectiveness of synthetic visual data both as an augmentation strategy and as a standalone training resource, applying our approach to Spanish and Catalan. Our results show that augmenting real AV data with synthetic samples yields relative Word Error Rate (WER) reductions of up to 16.2%, demonstrating the potential of this approach. Moreover, we demonstrate that synthetic data alone can serve as a baseline for AVSR training in languages lacking AV datasets. These findings provide evidence that synthetic visual data can serve as a scalable solution to AVSR data scarcity, enabling broader language coverage.