Multilingual Visual Speech Recognition with a Single Model by Learning with Discrete Visual Speech Units

This paper explores sentence-level Multilingual Visual Speech Recognition with a single model for the first time. As the massive multilingual modeling of visual data requires huge computational costs, we propose a novel strategy, processing with visual speech units. Motivated by the recent success of the audio speech unit, the proposed visual speech unit is obtained by discretizing the visual speech features extracted from the self-supervised visual speech model. To correctly capture multilingual visual speech, we first train the self-supervised visual speech model on 5,512 hours of multilingual audio-visual data. Through analysis, we verify that the visual speech units mainly contain viseme information while suppressing non-linguistic information. By using the visual speech units as the inputs of our system, we pre-train the model to predict corresponding text outputs on massive multilingual data constructed by merging several VSR databases. As both the inputs and outputs are discrete, we can greatly improve the training efficiency compared to the standard VSR training. Specifically, the input data size is reduced to 0.016% of the original video inputs. In order to complement the insufficient visual information in speech recognition, we apply curriculum learning where the inputs of the system begin with audio-visual speech units and gradually change to visual speech units. After pre-training, the model is finetuned on continuous features. We set new state-of-the-art multilingual VSR performances by achieving comparable performances to the previous language-specific VSR models, with a single trained model.

AV2AV: Direct Audio-Visual Speech to Audio-Visual Speech Translation with Unified Audio-Visual Speech Representation

This paper proposes a novel direct Audio-Visual Speech to Audio-Visual Speech Translation (AV2AV) framework, where the input and output of the system are multimodal (i.e., audio and visual speech). With the proposed AV2AV, two key advantages can be brought: 1) We can perform real-like conversations with individuals worldwide in a virtual meeting by utilizing our own primary languages. In contrast to Speech-to-Speech Translation (A2A), which solely translates between audio modalities, the proposed AV2AV directly translates between audio-visual speech. This capability enhances the dialogue experience by presenting synchronized lip movements along with the translated speech. 2) We can improve the robustness of the spoken language translation system. By employing the complementary information of audio-visual speech, the system can effectively translate spoken language even in the presence of acoustic noise, showcasing robust performance. To mitigate the problem of the absence of a parallel AV2AV translation dataset, we propose to train our spoken language translation system with the audio-only dataset of A2A. This is done by learning unified audio-visual speech representations through self-supervised learning in advance to train the translation system. Moreover, we propose an AV-Renderer that can generate raw audio and video in parallel. It is designed with zero-shot speaker modeling, thus the speaker in source audio-visual speech can be maintained at the target translated audio-visual speech. The effectiveness of AV2AV is evaluated with extensive experiments in a many-to-many language translation setting. The demo page is available on https://choijeongsoo.github.io/av2av.

Towards Practical and Efficient Image-to-Speech Captioning with Vision-Language Pre-training and Multi-modal Tokens

In this paper, we propose methods to build a powerful and efficient Image-to-Speech captioning (Im2Sp) model. To this end, we start with importing the rich knowledge related to image comprehension and language modeling from a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model into Im2Sp. We set the output of the proposed Im2Sp as discretized speech units, i.e., the quantized speech features of a self-supervised speech model. The speech units mainly contain linguistic information while suppressing other characteristics of speech. This allows us to incorporate the language modeling capability of the pre-trained vision-language model into the spoken language modeling of Im2Sp. With the vision-language pre-training strategy, we set new state-of-the-art Im2Sp performances on two widely used benchmark databases, COCO and Flickr8k. Then, we further improve the efficiency of the Im2Sp model. Similar to the speech unit case, we convert the original image into image units, which are derived through vector quantization of the raw image. With these image units, we can drastically reduce the required data storage for saving image data to just 0.8% when compared to the original image data in terms of bits. Demo page: https://ms-dot-k.github.io/Image-to-Speech-Captioning.

Lip Reading for Low-resource Languages by Learning and Combining General Speech Knowledge and Language-specific Knowledge

This paper proposes a novel lip reading framework, especially for low-resource languages, which has not been well addressed in the previous literature. Since low-resource languages do not have enough video-text paired data to train the model to have sufficient power to model lip movements and language, it is regarded as challenging to develop lip reading models for low-resource languages. In order to mitigate the challenge, we try to learn general speech knowledge, the ability to model lip movements, from a high-resource language through the prediction of speech units. It is known that different languages partially share common phonemes, thus general speech knowledge learned from one language can be extended to other languages. Then, we try to learn language-specific knowledge, the ability to model language, by proposing Language-specific Memory-augmented Decoder (LMDecoder). LMDecoder saves language-specific audio features into memory banks and can be trained on audio-text paired data which is more easily accessible than video-text paired data. Therefore, with LMDecoder, we can transform the input speech units into language-specific audio features and translate them into texts by utilizing the learned rich language knowledge. Finally, by combining general speech knowledge and language-specific knowledge, we can efficiently develop lip reading models even for low-resource languages. Through extensive experiments using five languages, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated.

DiffV2S: Diffusion-based Video-to-Speech Synthesis with Vision-guided Speaker Embedding

Recent research has demonstrated impressive results in video-to-speech synthesis which involves reconstructing speech solely from visual input. However, previous works have struggled to accurately synthesize speech due to a lack of sufficient guidance for the model to infer the correct content with the appropriate sound. To resolve the issue, they have adopted an extra speaker embedding as a speaking style guidance from a reference auditory information. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to obtain the audio information from the corresponding video input, especially during the inference time. In this paper, we present a novel vision-guided speaker embedding extractor using a self-supervised pre-trained model and prompt tuning technique. In doing so, the rich speaker embedding information can be produced solely from input visual information, and the extra audio information is not necessary during the inference time. Using the extracted vision-guided speaker embedding representations, we further develop a diffusion-based video-to-speech synthesis model, so called DiffV2S, conditioned on those speaker embeddings and the visual representation extracted from the input video. The proposed DiffV2S not only maintains phoneme details contained in the input video frames, but also creates a highly intelligible mel-spectrogram in which the speaker identities of the multiple speakers are all preserved. Our experimental results show that DiffV2S achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to the previous video-to-speech synthesis technique.

AKVSR: Audio Knowledge Empowered Visual Speech Recognition by Compressing Audio Knowledge of a Pretrained Model

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) is the task of predicting spoken words from silent lip movements. VSR is regarded as a challenging task because of the insufficient information on lip movements. In this paper, we propose an Audio Knowledge empowered Visual Speech Recognition framework (AKVSR) to complement the insufficient speech information of visual modality by using audio modality. Different from the previous methods, the proposed AKVSR 1) utilizes rich audio knowledge encoded by a large-scale pretrained audio model, 2) saves the linguistic information of audio knowledge in compact audio memory by discarding the non-linguistic information from the audio through quantization, and 3) includes Audio Bridging Module which can find the best-matched audio features from the compact audio memory, which makes our training possible without audio inputs, once after the compact audio memory is composed. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive experiments, and achieve new state-of-the-art performances on the widely-used datasets, LRS2 and LRS3.

Many-to-Many Spoken Language Translation via Unified Speech and Text Representation Learning with Unit-to-Unit Translation

In this paper, we propose a method to learn unified representations of multilingual speech and text with a single model, especially focusing on the purpose of speech synthesis. We represent multilingual speech audio with speech units, the quantized representations of speech features encoded from a self-supervised speech model. Therefore, we can focus on their linguistic content by treating the audio as pseudo text and can build a unified representation of speech and text. Then, we propose to train an encoder-decoder structured model with a Unit-to-Unit Translation (UTUT) objective on multilingual data. Specifically, by conditioning the encoder with the source language token and the decoder with the target language token, the model is optimized to translate the spoken language into that of the target language, in a many-to-many language translation setting. Therefore, the model can build the knowledge of how spoken languages are comprehended and how to relate them to different languages. A single pre-trained model with UTUT can be employed for diverse multilingual speech- and text-related tasks, such as Speech-to-Speech Translation (STS), multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS), and Text-to-Speech Translation (TTST). By conducting comprehensive experiments encompassing various languages, we validate the efficacy of the proposed method across diverse multilingual tasks. Moreover, we show UTUT can perform many-to-many language STS, which has not been previously explored in the literature. Samples are available on https://choijeongsoo.github.io/utut.

Reprogramming Audio-driven Talking Face Synthesis into Text-driven

In this paper, we propose a method to reprogram pre-trained audio-driven talking face synthesis models to be able to operate with text inputs. As the audio-driven talking face synthesis model takes speech audio as inputs, in order to generate a talking avatar with the desired speech content, speech recording needs to be performed in advance. However, this is burdensome to record audio for every video to be generated. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a novel method that embeds input text into the learned audio latent space of the pre-trained audio-driven model. To this end, we design a Text-to-Audio Embedding Module (TAEM) which is guided to learn to map a given text input to the audio latent features. Moreover, to model the speaker characteristics lying in the audio features, we propose to inject visual speaker embedding into the TAEM, which is obtained from a single face image. After training, we can synthesize talking face videos with either text or speech audio.

Intelligible Lip-to-Speech Synthesis with Speech Units

In this paper, we propose a novel Lip-to-Speech synthesis (L2S) framework, for synthesizing intelligible speech from a silent lip movement video. Specifically, to complement the insufficient supervisory signal of the previous L2S model, we propose to use quantized self-supervised speech representations, named speech units, as an additional prediction target for the L2S model. Therefore, the proposed L2S model is trained to generate multiple targets, mel-spectrogram and speech units. As the speech units are discrete while mel-spectrogram is continuous, the proposed multi-target L2S model can be trained with strong content supervision, without using text-labeled data. Moreover, to accurately convert the synthesized mel-spectrogram into a waveform, we introduce a multi-input vocoder that can generate a clear waveform even from blurry and noisy mel-spectrogram by referring to the speech units. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in L2S.

Exploring Phonetic Context in Lip Movement for Authentic Talking Face Generation

Talking face generation is the task of synthesizing a natural face synchronous to driving audio. Although much progress has been made in terms of visual quality, lip synchronization, and facial motion of the talking face, current works still struggle to overcome issues of crude and asynchronous lip movement, which can result in puppetry-like animation. We identify that the prior works commonly correlate lip movement with audio at the phone level. However, due to co-articulation, where an isolated phone is influenced by the preceding or following phones, the articulation of a phone varies upon the phonetic context. Therefore, modeling lip motion with the phonetic context can generate more spatio-temporally aligned and stable lip movement. In this respect, we investigate the phonetic context in lip motion for authentic talking face generation. We propose a Context-Aware Lip-Sync framework (CALS), which leverages phonetic context to generate more spatio-temporally aligned and stable lip movement. The CALS comprises an Audio-to-Lip module and a Lip-to-Face module. The former explicitly maps each phone to a contextualized lip motion unit, which guides the latter in synthesizing a target identity with context-aware lip motion. In addition, we introduce a discriminative sync critic that enforces accurate lip displacements within the phonetic context through audio-visual sync loss and visual discriminative sync loss. From extensive experiments on LRW, LRS2, and HDTF datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed CALS effectively enhances spatio-temporal alignment, greatly improving upon the state-of-the-art on visual quality, lip-sync quality, and realness. Finally, we show the authenticity of the generated video through a lip readability test and achieve 97.7% of relative word prediction accuracy to real videos.