Bootstrapping Audiovisual Speech Recognition in Zero-AV-Resource Scenarios with Synthetic Visual Data

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08249v1
• Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:22:24 GMT
• Title: Bootstrapping Audiovisual Speech Recognition in Zero-AV-Resource Scenarios with Synthetic Visual Data
• Abstract summary: We propose a zero-AV-resource AVSR framework that relies on synthetic visual streams generated by lip-syncing static facial images with real audio.<n>We synthesize over 700 hours of talking-head video and fine-tune a pre-trained AV-HuBERT model.<n>Our model achieves near state-of-the-art performance with much fewer parameters and training data, outperforms an identically trained audio-only baseline, and preserves multimodal advantages in noise.
• Score: 4.911970211082446
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) combines acoustic and visual cues to improve transcription robustness under challenging conditions but remains out of reach for most under-resourced languages due to the lack of labeled video corpora for training. We propose a zero-AV-resource AVSR framework that relies on synthetic visual streams generated by lip-syncing static facial images with real audio. We first evaluate synthetic visual augmentation on Spanish benchmarks, then apply it to Catalan, a language with no annotated audiovisual corpora. We synthesize over 700 hours of talking-head video and fine-tune a pre-trained AV-HuBERT model. On a manually annotated Catalan benchmark, our model achieves near state-of-the-art performance with much fewer parameters and training data, outperforms an identically trained audio-only baseline, and preserves multimodal advantages in noise. Scalable synthetic video thus offers a viable substitute for real recordings in zero-AV-resource AVSR.

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