Huan Zhou

He Wang, Pengcheng Guo, Xucheng Wan et al.

Automatic lip-reading (ALR) aims to automatically transcribe spoken content from a speaker's silent lip motion captured in video. Current mainstream lip-reading approaches only use a single visual encoder to model input videos of a single scale. In this paper, we propose to enhance lip-reading by incorporating multi-scale video data and multi-encoder. Specifically, we first propose a novel multi-scale lip motion extraction algorithm based on the size of the speaker's face and an Enhanced ResNet3D visual front-end (VFE) to extract lip features at different scales. For the multi-encoder, in addition to the mainstream Transformer and Conformer, we also incorporate the recently proposed Branchformer and E-Branchformer as visual encoders. In the experiments, we explore the influence of different video data scales and encoders on ALR system performance and fuse the texts transcribed by all ALR systems using recognizer output voting error reduction (ROVER). Finally, our proposed approach placed second in the ICME 2024 ChatCLR Challenge Task 2, with a 21.52% reduction in character error rate (CER) compared to the official baseline on the evaluation set.

Ye Mo, Zirui Shao, Kai Ye et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in document understanding. However, the information-dense nature of document images still poses challenges, as most queries depend on only a few relevant regions, with the rest being redundant. Existing one-pass MLLMs process entire document images without considering query relevance, often failing to focus on critical regions and producing unfaithful responses. Inspired by the human coarse-to-fine reading pattern, we introduce Doc-CoB (Chain-of-Box), a simple-yet-effective mechanism that integrates human-style visual reasoning into MLLM without modifying its architecture. Our method allows the model to autonomously select the set of regions (boxes) most relevant to the query, and then focus attention on them for further understanding. We first design a fully automatic pipeline, integrating a commercial MLLM with a layout analyzer, to generate 249k training samples with intermediate visual reasoning supervision. Then we incorporate two enabling tasks that improve box identification and box-query reasoning, which together enhance document understanding. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks with four popular models show that Doc-CoB significantly improves performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and wide applicability. All code, data, and models will be released publicly.

Naijun Zheng, Xucheng Wan, Kai Liu et al.

Although contextualized automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly used to improve the recognition of uncommon words, their effectiveness is hindered by the inherent limitations of speech-text data availability. To address this challenge, our study proposes to leverage extensive text-only datasets and contextualize pre-trained ASR models using a straightforward text-augmentation (TA) technique, all while keeping computational costs minimal. In particular, to contextualize a pre-trained CIF-based ASR, we construct a codebook using limited speech-text data. By utilizing a simple codebook lookup process, we convert available text-only data into latent text embeddings. These embeddings then enhance the inputs for the contextualized ASR. Our experiments on diverse Mandarin test sets demonstrate that our TA approach significantly boosts recognition performance. The top-performing system shows relative CER improvements of up to 30% on rare words and 15% across all words in general.