Zehua Liu

Zehua Liu, Xiaolou Li, Chen Chen et al.

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) aims to recognize corresponding text by analyzing visual information from lip movements. Due to the high variability and weak information of lip movements, VSR tasks require effectively utilizing any information from any source and at any level. In this paper, we propose a VSR method based on audio-visual cross-modal alignment, named AlignVSR. The method leverages the audio modality as an auxiliary information source and utilizes the global and local correspondence between the audio and visual modalities to improve visual-to-text inference. Specifically, the method first captures global alignment between video and audio through a cross-modal attention mechanism from video frames to a bank of audio units. Then, based on the temporal correspondence between audio and video, a frame-level local alignment loss is introduced to refine the global alignment, improving the utility of the audio information. Experimental results on the LRS2 and CNVSRC.Single datasets consistently show that AlignVSR outperforms several mainstream VSR methods, demonstrating its superior and robust performance.

Zehua Liu, Xiaolou Li, Chen Chen et al.

This paper presents the second Chinese Continuous Visual Speech Recognition Challenge (CNVSRC 2024), which builds on CNVSRC 2023 to advance research in Chinese Large Vocabulary Continuous Visual Speech Recognition (LVC-VSR). The challenge evaluates two test scenarios: reading in recording studios and Internet speech. CNVSRC 2024 uses the same datasets as its predecessor CNVSRC 2023, which involves CN-CVS for training and CNVSRC-Single/Multi for development and evaluation. However, CNVSRC 2024 introduced two key improvements: (1) a stronger baseline system, and (2) an additional dataset, CN-CVS2-P1, for open tracks to improve data volume and diversity. The new challenge has demonstrated several important innovations in data preprocessing, feature extraction, model design, and training strategies, further pushing the state-of-the-art in Chinese LVC-VSR. More details and resources are available at the official website.

Yuxuan Yao, Shuqi Liu, Zehua Liu et al.

Recent research has increasingly focused on reconciling the reasoning capabilities of System 2 with the efficiency of System 1. While existing training-based and prompt-based approaches face significant challenges in terms of efficiency and stability, model merging emerges as a promising strategy to integrate the diverse capabilities of different Large Language Models (LLMs) into a unified model. However, conventional model merging methods often assume uniform importance across layers, overlooking the functional heterogeneity inherent in neural components. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{A}ctivation-Guided \textbf{C}onsensus \textbf{M}erging (\textbf{ACM}), a plug-and-play merging framework that determines layer-specific merging coefficients based on mutual information between activations of pre-trained and fine-tuned models. ACM effectively preserves task-specific capabilities without requiring gradient computations or additional training. Extensive experiments on Long-to-Short (L2S) and general merging tasks demonstrate that ACM consistently outperforms all baseline methods. For instance, in the case of Qwen-7B models, TIES-Merging equipped with ACM achieves a \textbf{55.3\%} reduction in response length while simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy by \textbf{1.3} points.

Chen Chen, Zehua Liu, Xiaolou Li et al.

The first Chinese Continuous Visual Speech Recognition Challenge aimed to probe the performance of Large Vocabulary Continuous Visual Speech Recognition (LVC-VSR) on two tasks: (1) Single-speaker VSR for a particular speaker and (2) Multi-speaker VSR for a set of registered speakers. The challenge yielded highly successful results, with the best submission significantly outperforming the baseline, particularly in the single-speaker task. This paper comprehensively reviews the challenge, encompassing the data profile, task specifications, and baseline system construction. It also summarises the representative techniques employed by the submitted systems, highlighting the most effective approaches. Additional information and resources about this challenge can be accessed through the official website at http://cnceleb.org/competition.