Tailored Design of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Models using Branchformers

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Main Authors: Gimeno-Gómez, David, Martínez-Hinarejos, Carlos-D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gimeno-Gómez, David
Martínez-Hinarejos, Carlos-D.
author_facet Gimeno-Gómez, David
Martínez-Hinarejos, Carlos-D.
contents Recent advances in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) have led to unprecedented achievements in the field, improving the robustness of this type of system in adverse, noisy environments. In most cases, this task has been addressed through the design of models composed of two independent encoders, each dedicated to a specific modality. However, while recent works have explored unified audio-visual encoders, determining the optimal cross-modal architecture remains an ongoing challenge. Furthermore, such approaches often rely on models comprising vast amounts of parameters and high computational cost training processes. In this paper, we aim to bridge this research gap by introducing a novel audio-visual framework. Our proposed method constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to harness the flexibility and interpretability offered by encoder architectures, such as the Branchformer, in the design of parameter-efficient AVSR systems. To be more precise, the proposed framework consists of two steps: first, estimating audio- and video-only systems, and then designing a tailored audio-visual unified encoder based on the layer-level branch scores provided by the modality-specific models. Extensive experiments on English and Spanish AVSR benchmarks covering multiple data conditions and scenarios demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method. Even when trained on a moderate scale of data, our models achieve competitive word error rates (WER) of approximately 2.5\% for English and surpass existing approaches for Spanish, establishing a new benchmark with an average WER of around 9.1\%. These results reflect how our tailored AVSR system is able to reach state-of-the-art recognition rates while significantly reducing the model complexity w.r.t. the prevalent approach in the field. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/david-gimeno/tailored-avsr.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_06606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tailored Design of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Models using Branchformers
Gimeno-Gómez, David
Martínez-Hinarejos, Carlos-D.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Recent advances in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) have led to unprecedented achievements in the field, improving the robustness of this type of system in adverse, noisy environments. In most cases, this task has been addressed through the design of models composed of two independent encoders, each dedicated to a specific modality. However, while recent works have explored unified audio-visual encoders, determining the optimal cross-modal architecture remains an ongoing challenge. Furthermore, such approaches often rely on models comprising vast amounts of parameters and high computational cost training processes. In this paper, we aim to bridge this research gap by introducing a novel audio-visual framework. Our proposed method constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to harness the flexibility and interpretability offered by encoder architectures, such as the Branchformer, in the design of parameter-efficient AVSR systems. To be more precise, the proposed framework consists of two steps: first, estimating audio- and video-only systems, and then designing a tailored audio-visual unified encoder based on the layer-level branch scores provided by the modality-specific models. Extensive experiments on English and Spanish AVSR benchmarks covering multiple data conditions and scenarios demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method. Even when trained on a moderate scale of data, our models achieve competitive word error rates (WER) of approximately 2.5\% for English and surpass existing approaches for Spanish, establishing a new benchmark with an average WER of around 9.1\%. These results reflect how our tailored AVSR system is able to reach state-of-the-art recognition rates while significantly reducing the model complexity w.r.t. the prevalent approach in the field. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/david-gimeno/tailored-avsr.
title Tailored Design of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Models using Branchformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06606