# Learning Visual Speech Representations via Cross-Modal Distillation and Joint Face-Lip Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19559/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (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)
- [Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03619/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Learning with Random-projection Quantizer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01855/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Audio-visual Speech Recognition with Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06657/) (2021)
- [Multi-task self-supervised learning for Robust Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09239/) (2020)
- [Auto-AVSR: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Automatic Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14307/) (2023)
- [Lipreading using Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08702/) (2020)
- [ASR is all you need: cross-modal distillation for lip reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12747/) (2019)
- [Robust Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01763/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06424/) (2018)
- [Sub-word Level Lip Reading With Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07603/) (2021)
- [Jointly Learning Visual and Auditory Speech Representations from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06246/) (2022)
- [LiRA: Learning Visual Speech Representations from Audio through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09171/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Strong Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12319/) (2024)
- [Hearing Lips: Improving Lip Reading by Distilling Speech Recognizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11502/) (2019)
- [u-HuBERT: Unified Mixed-Modal Speech Pretraining And Zero-Shot Transfer to Unlabeled Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07036/) (2022)
- [VATLM: Visual-Audio-Text Pre-Training with Unified Masked Prediction for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11275/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Video Front-Ends for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Single and Multi-Person Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10439/) (2022)
- [Can We Read Speech Beyond the Lips? Rethinking RoI Selection for Deep Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03206/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lipreading remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of visual speech cues and their sensitivity to head pose and video resolution. In this work, we propose FLARE, a framework for robust visual speech representation learning via cross-modal distillation and joint face-lip modeling. FLARE leverages semantically rich Whisper representations as the acoustic teacher signal, converting them into discrete distillation targets through a random-projection quantizer and pretraining the model with a masked prediction objective. To capture complementary visual information, FLARE employs a dual-stream architecture that jointly processes lip region-of-interest (ROI) and full-face inputs, where the lip stream captures finegrained articulatory motion and the face stream encodes broader facial dynamics. During pretraining, auxiliary audio input is incorporated to facilitate cross-modal alignment, and modality dropout is applied to encourage robust visual-only representations. For downstream lipreading, FLARE serves as a visual encoder coupled with either a lightweight Transformer decoder or an LLM-based decoder. Evaluated on LRS2, LRS3, and the out-of-domain WildVSR benchmark, FLARE achieves strong lipreading performance, with word error rates of 11.7%, 13.2%, and 34.3%, respectively. A progressive design study confirms the contribution of each major component. Further analyses demonstrate that joint face-lip modeling improves robustness under degraded video resolution and large head pose variation, while yielding more phoneme-discriminative visual representations. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/jxzhanggg/FLARE.