Papers › Audio-Visual Representation Learning via Knowledge Distillation from Speech Foundation Models

Audio-Visual Representation Learning via Knowledge Distillation from Speech Foundation Models

9 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.05766archive 2025-07-28

Jing-Xuan Zhang, Genshun Wan, Jianqing Gao, Zhen-Hua Ling

Audio-visual representation learning is crucial for advancing multimodal speech processing tasks, such as lipreading and audio-visual speech recognition. Recently, speech foundation models (SFMs) have shown remarkable generalization capabilities across various speech-related tasks. Building on this progress, we propose an audio-visual representation learning model that leverages cross-modal knowledge distillation from SFMs. In our method, SFMs serve as teachers, from which multi-layer hidden representations are extracted using clean audio inputs. We also introduce a multi-teacher ensemble method to distill the student, which receives audio-visual data as inputs. A novel representational knowledge distillation loss is employed to train the student during pretraining, which is also applied during finetuning to further enhance the performance on downstream tasks. Our experiments utilized both a self-supervised SFM, WavLM, and a supervised SFM, iFLYTEK-speech. The results demonstrated that our proposed method achieved superior or at least comparable performance to previous state-of-the-art baselines across automatic speech recognition, visual speech recognition, and audio-visual speech recognition tasks. Additionally, comprehensive ablation studies and the visualization of learned representations were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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Code

jxzhanggg/DistillAV officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Audio-Visual Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Knowledge DistillationLipreadingRepresentation LearningSpeech RecognitionVisual Speech Recognitionspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Audio-Visual Speech Recognition LRS3-TED DistillAV Word Error Rate (WER) 1.3 #5 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) LRS3-TED DistillAV WER 1.4 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Lipreading LRS3-TED DistillAV Word Error Rate (WER) 26.2 #9 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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