Papers for
video conferencing developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Audio visual models mistakenly match speech to faces by position
Uncovering Ordinal-Matching Bias in Audio-Visual LLMs
Abstract: This work aims to improve how audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) associate speech with the correct visible speaker in multi-speaker scenes. We find that current AVLLMs frequently fail at this task, and analyze the nature of these failures. To this end, we construct a synthetic diagnostic dataset in which multiple visible speakers each utter a single word. Analysis on this corpus reveals a consistent error pattern across three recent open-source AVLLMs: models attribute utterances by simply matching the order of spoken sentences with the left-to-right, top-to-bottom arrangement of visible faces, rather than relying on audio-visual cues such as lip synchronization. We term this behavior \emph{ordinal-matching bias}. We further show that this bias can be substantially mitigated through a simple remedy, Ordinal-Decoupled Fine-Tuning (OD-FT), in which models are fine-tuned on synthetic videos where spatial positions of speakers and speaking order are independently randomized. Despite using only 400 synthetic training videos, OD-FT not only suppresses ordinal-matching bias but also improves audio-visual understanding on real-world videos, yielding average gains of 8.27\% for Qwen2.5-Omni and 2.57\% for video-SALMONN2+ across three audio-visual benchmarks.
Audio-visual method enhances target speaker voice with low delay
Adapting Personalized Speech Enhancement for Low-Latency Audio-Visual Target-Speaker Extraction
Abstract: Online audio-visual target-speaker extraction aims to remove competing voices while preserving speech quality and bounding lookahead. Existing extractors are built and evaluated for separation on synthetic mixtures, leaving listening quality and meeting behavior largely untested. We introduce Audio-Visual Personalized Voice Quality Enhancement (AV-PVQE), which approaches these requirements from the other direction. We start from a personalized speech enhancement model that reconstructs a requested voice at high quality but confuses the target in 46% of two-speaker mixtures despite clean enrollment. Adding mouth features at its speaker-conditioning input and jointly fine-tuning the visual and reconstruction networks reduces this rate to 1.6%, with no future frames and 20 ms of algorithmic delay. Compared with an online autoregressive audio-visual extractor, AV-PVQE yields separation gains on two synthetic benchmarks and larger gains on recorded meetings, and keeps its advantage on excerpts with more speakers than the fine-tuning mixtures. In personalized P.835 listening tests on two meeting corpora, it improves overall quality over this extractor by 0.57 and 0.63 MOS, with similar mean rating relative to the starting model. Preservation and rejection tests show that it keeps the target intact when no competing voice is present and suppresses competing speech when the target is absent.
Active speaker detection improves with joint audio and face modeling
ROAM-ASD: Robust Open-World Active Speaker Detection with Flexible Multimodal Fusion
Abstract: Active speaker detection (ASD) requires reliable association between visible faces and acoustic speech, yet existing systems often degrade under challenging domains or incomplete observations. We introduce ROAM-ASD, a robust audiovisual framework that jointly models audio, full-face, and fine-grained mouth representations. A unified joint self-attention mechanism processes all input streams together with modality-agnostic query tokens, enabling direct interaction among available modality inputs. Modality dropout further improves robustness when input streams are unavailable. ROAM-ASD achieves state-of-the-art performance across five ASD benchmarks: 98.8% mAP on WASD, 87.9% on UniTalk, 96.5% on AVA, 99.3% on ASW, and 98.2% on Talkies, improving over previous best systems by 5.1, 4.7, 0.9, 1.0, and 2.1 mAP points, respectively. ROAM-ASD also substantially improves zero-shot cross-dataset generalization and remains robust to missing observations.
Audio visual speech recognition struggles outside broadcast settings
AVSRBench: A Multi-Condition AVSR Benchmark
Abstract: While AVSR has achieved sub-1% word error rates on the standard LRS3 benchmark, its reliance on broadcast speech obscures whether this reflects true generalization or just domain adaptation. To investigate this gap, we evaluate three AVSR architectures across six conditions: controlled broadcast speech, fixed-grammar utterances, hyper-articulated Lombard speech, read speech from professional lipspeakers and non-professional speakers, and spontaneous multi-party video conversations. We find that visual-only performance deteriorates rapidly beyond broadcast domains, and audio-video fusion mainly benefits Lombard speech environments. Visual understanding degrades sharply at 90° profile views, with multimodal systems relying largely on acoustic fallback. Additionally, speaker articulation proves more critical than minor camera shifts, and LLM-based architectures suffer from poor out-of-domain generalization. Our work highlights a significant generalization gap in current AVSR research. To address this, we also introduce RoomReader-AV as a new benchmark for AVSR and release a unified data preprocessing pipeline to make comprehensive multi-condition evaluation accessible.