Learning Speaker-Invariant Visual Features for Lipreading
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge in lipreading by improving model generalization, though it is incremental as it builds on existing disentanglement techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of speaker-specific lip attributes degrading lipreading accuracy and generalization by introducing SIFLip, a framework that disentangles these attributes using implicit and explicit modules, resulting in improved generalization performance across multiple datasets.
Lipreading is a challenging cross-modal task that aims to convert visual lip movements into spoken text. Existing lipreading methods often extract visual features that include speaker-specific lip attributes (e.g., shape, color, texture), which introduce spurious correlations between vision and text. These correlations lead to suboptimal lipreading accuracy and restrict model generalization. To address this challenge, we introduce SIFLip, a speaker-invariant visual feature learning framework that disentangles speaker-specific attributes using two complementary disentanglement modules (Implicit Disentanglement and Explicit Disentanglement) to improve generalization. Specifically, since different speakers exhibit semantic consistency between lip movements and phonetic text when pronouncing the same words, our implicit disentanglement module leverages stable text embeddings as supervisory signals to learn common visual representations across speakers, implicitly decoupling speaker-specific features. Additionally, we design a speaker recognition sub-task within the main lipreading pipeline to filter speaker-specific features, then further explicitly disentangle these personalized visual features from the backbone network via gradient reversal. Experimental results demonstrate that SIFLip significantly enhances generalization performance across multiple public datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SIFLip significantly improves generalization performance across multiple public datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.