CVPR 2024 Papers

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. Demo page is available on choijeongsoo.github.io/av2av.

Accurate estimation of Room Impulse Response (RIR) which captures an environment's acoustic properties is important for speech processing and AR/VR applications. We propose AV-RIR a novel multi-modal multi-task learning approach to accurately estimate the RIR from a given reverberant speech signal and the visual cues of its corresponding environment. AV-RIR builds on a novel neural codec-based architecture that effectively captures environment geometry and materials properties and solves speech dereverberation as an auxiliary task by using multi-task learning. We also propose Geo-Mat features that augment material information into visual cues and CRIP that improves late reverberation components in the estimated RIR via image-to-RIR retrieval by 86%. Empirical results show that AV-RIR quantitatively outperforms previous audio-only and visual-only approaches by achieving 36% - 63% improvement across various acoustic metrics in RIR estimation. Additionally it also achieves higher preference scores in human evaluation. As an auxiliary benefit dereverbed speech from AV-RIR shows competitive performance with the state-of-the-art in various spoken language processing tasks and outperforms reverberation time error score in the real-world AVSpeech dataset. Qualitative examples of both synthesized reverberant speech and enhanced speech are available online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTsKhviukAE.

Advanced Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) systems have been observed to be sensitive to missing video frames performing even worse than single-modality models. While applying the common dropout techniques to the video modality enhances robustness to missing frames it simultaneously results in a performance loss when dealing with complete data input. In this study we delve into this contrasting phenomenon through the lens of modality bias and uncover that an excessive modality bias towards the audio modality induced by dropout constitutes the fundamental cause. Next we present the Modality Bias Hypothesis (MBH) to systematically describe the relationship between the modality bias and the robustness against missing modality in multimodal systems. Building on these findings we propose a novel Multimodal Distribution Approximation with Knowledge Distillation (MDA-KD) framework to reduce over-reliance on the audio modality maintaining performance and robustness simultaneously. Finally to address an entirely missing modality we adopt adapters to dynamically switch decision strategies. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated through comprehensive experiments on the MISP2021 and MISP2022 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/dalision/ModalBiasAVSR.