Whisper-Flamingo: Adapting Whisper for Improved Audio-Visual Speech Recognition and Translation by Integrating Visual Features
Konsep Inti
Whisper-Flamingo, a novel model integrating visual features from AV-HuBERT into the Whisper model using gated cross attention, achieves state-of-the-art performance in both audio-visual speech recognition and translation, demonstrating significant improvements in noisy conditions.
Abstrak
- Bibliographic Information: Rouditchenko, A., Gong, Y., Thomas, S., Karlinsky, L., Kuehne, H., Feris, R., ... & Glass, J. (2024). Whisper-Flamingo: Integrating Visual Features into Whisper for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition and Translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10082v2.
- Research Objective: This paper introduces Whisper-Flamingo, a new model that leverages visual features to enhance the performance of Whisper, a large-scale speech recognition model, in both audio-visual speech recognition and translation tasks.
- Methodology: The researchers propose integrating visual features extracted from AV-HuBERT, a self-supervised audio-visual model, into Whisper's decoder using gated cross-attention layers. This approach allows the model to effectively combine audio and visual information for improved speech recognition, particularly in noisy environments. The model is trained on the LRS3 and MuAViC datasets for English speech recognition and English-to-X translation tasks, respectively.
- Key Findings: Whisper-Flamingo achieves state-of-the-art results on the LRS3 benchmark for both audio-visual speech recognition and translation, demonstrating significant improvements over audio-only Whisper, especially in noisy conditions. Notably, the model achieves a 0.76% word error rate on LRS3 for audio-visual speech recognition, surpassing previous state-of-the-art models. Additionally, Whisper-Flamingo exhibits strong performance in English-to-X translation, outperforming previous methods in both clean and noisy audio conditions.
- Main Conclusions: Integrating visual features into large-scale speech models like Whisper through gated cross attention significantly improves audio-visual speech recognition and translation, particularly in noisy environments. The proposed Whisper-Flamingo model effectively leverages visual information to enhance speech recognition accuracy and demonstrates the potential of multi-modal learning for speech-related tasks.
- Significance: This research significantly contributes to the field of audio-visual speech recognition by presenting a novel and effective method for integrating visual features into large-scale speech models. The proposed Whisper-Flamingo model achieves state-of-the-art performance and highlights the importance of multi-modal learning for improving speech recognition accuracy, especially in challenging acoustic conditions.
- Limitations and Future Research: While Whisper-Flamingo demonstrates impressive performance, the authors acknowledge the need for further exploration in multilingual speech recognition and translation beyond English-centric tasks. Future research could investigate the effectiveness of Whisper-Flamingo with other pre-trained visual encoders and explore its application in low-resource language settings.
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Whisper-Flamingo: Integrating Visual Features into Whisper for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition and Translation
Statistik
Whisper-Flamingo achieves state-of-the-art ASR WER (0.68%) and AVSR WER (0.76%) on LRS3.
Whisper-Flamingo significantly outperforms the audio-only Whisper baseline in noise for both En transcription and En-X translation for 6 languages.
On the English (En) LRS3 video dataset, Whisper-Flamingo achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) ASR WER (0.68%) and AVSR WER (0.76%).
Whisper-Flamingo significantly improves the audio-only Whisper fine-tuned baseline from 12.6% to 7.0% WER in noisy conditions.
Fine-tuning audio-only Whisper-Large for En-X translation achieves an average BLEU score of 22.7, outperforming the previous SOTA of 21.9 from Bilingual AV-HuBERT.
With multilingual babble noise, Whisper-Flamingo significantly outperforms the audio-only Whisper model in average BLEU score (20.5 vs 18.6) and En WER (7.2% vs 13.8%).
Kutipan
"Our models achieve state-of-the-art ASR WER (0.68%) and AVSR WER (0.76%) on LRS3."
"Audio-visual Whisper-Flamingo outperforms audio-only Whisper on English speech recognition and En-X translation for 6 languages in noisy conditions."
"Moreover, Whisper-Flamingo is versatile and conducts all of these tasks using one set of parameters, while prior methods are trained separately on each language."
Pertanyaan yang Lebih Dalam
How might Whisper-Flamingo's performance be further enhanced by incorporating other modalities, such as facial expressions or gestures, in addition to lip movements?
Incorporating additional modalities like facial expressions and gestures could significantly enhance Whisper-Flamingo's performance, particularly in challenging acoustic environments or when dealing with nuanced speech. Here's how:
Improved Speech Recognition in Noise: While lip movements provide a visual cue for speech content, facial expressions and gestures often carry information about prosody, emphasis, and even word disambiguation. Integrating these cues could help the model better interpret speech signals in noisy environments where the audio might be degraded.
Enhanced Disambiguation: Certain phonemes or words that are visually similar on the lips might be differentiated by facial expressions or hand gestures. For example, a sarcastic phrase might be accompanied by a particular facial expression, aiding the model in correctly interpreting the intended meaning.
Speaker State Recognition: Facial expressions are closely tied to emotions and speaker states. By analyzing these expressions, the model could gain insights into the speaker's emotional state, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the spoken content. This could be particularly valuable in applications like sentiment analysis or human-computer interaction.
Implementation Challenges:
Data Requirements: Training models to effectively utilize facial expressions and gestures would necessitate large-scale datasets annotated with this information, which can be challenging and expensive to acquire.
Computational Complexity: Processing additional modalities would increase the computational complexity of the model, potentially requiring more powerful hardware for training and inference.
Fusion Strategies: Developing effective strategies for fusing information from multiple modalities would be crucial to ensure that the model can leverage the complementary information from each source.
Could the reliance on large-scale pre-trained models like Whisper and AV-HuBERT limit Whisper-Flamingo's applicability in low-resource scenarios with limited data availability?
Yes, the reliance on large-scale pre-trained models like Whisper and AV-HuBERT could potentially limit Whisper-Flamingo's applicability in low-resource scenarios. Here's why:
Data Scarcity: Pre-trained models like Whisper and AV-HuBERT achieve their impressive performance by training on massive datasets. In low-resource scenarios, where such large-scale data might not be available, these models might not generalize well.
Overfitting Risk: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on limited data can lead to overfitting, where the model memorizes the training data instead of learning generalizable features. This can result in poor performance on unseen data.
Computational Constraints: Training and even deploying large models can be computationally expensive, posing challenges in resource-constrained environments.
Potential Solutions:
Transfer Learning with Smaller Models: Exploring transfer learning techniques with smaller, more efficient models could be a viable approach. This involves pre-training a smaller model on a related task with more data and then fine-tuning it on the low-resource target task.
Data Augmentation: Applying data augmentation techniques can artificially increase the size and diversity of the training data, potentially improving the model's ability to generalize.
Model Compression: Techniques like model pruning or quantization can reduce the size and computational requirements of pre-trained models, making them more suitable for deployment in low-resource settings.
What are the ethical implications of developing increasingly accurate audio-visual speech recognition technology, and how can we ensure its responsible development and deployment?
The development of increasingly accurate audio-visual speech recognition technology presents several ethical implications that necessitate careful consideration:
Privacy Concerns: The ability to transcribe speech from video recordings raises significant privacy concerns. If deployed without proper safeguards, this technology could be used for covert surveillance or to collect personal information without consent.
Bias and Discrimination: Like many AI systems, audio-visual speech recognition models can inherit biases present in the training data. This could lead to discriminatory outcomes, for example, if the model performs poorly on certain accents or dialects.
Misuse Potential: The technology could be misused for malicious purposes, such as creating deepfakes or generating synthetic speech to spread misinformation or impersonate individuals.
Ensuring Responsible Development and Deployment:
Privacy by Design: Incorporating privacy-preserving techniques, such as differential privacy or federated learning, can help mitigate privacy risks.
Bias Mitigation: Addressing bias in training data and developing methods to detect and mitigate bias in model outputs is crucial.
Transparency and Explainability: Making models more transparent and explainable can help build trust and ensure that decisions based on their outputs are fair and justifiable.
Regulation and Oversight: Establishing clear guidelines and regulations for the development and deployment of audio-visual speech recognition technology is essential to prevent misuse and protect individual rights.
Public Engagement: Fostering open discussions about the ethical implications of this technology and involving stakeholders in the decision-making process can help ensure its responsible development and use.