Learning Visual Speech Representations via Cross-Modal Distillation and Joint Face-Lip Modeling

Lipreading remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of visual speech cues and their sensitivity to head pose and video resolution. In this work, we propose FLARE, a framework for robust visual speech representation learning via cross-modal distillation and joint face-lip modeling. FLARE leverages semantically rich Whisper representations as the acoustic teacher signal, converting them into discrete distillation targets through a random-projection quantizer and pretraining the model with a masked prediction objective. To capture complementary visual information, FLARE employs a dual-stream architecture that jointly processes lip region-of-interest (ROI) and full-face inputs, where the lip stream captures fine-grained articulatory motion and the face stream encodes broader facial dynamics. During pretraining, auxiliary audio input is incorporated to facilitate cross-modal alignment, and modality dropout is applied to encourage robust visual-only representations. For downstream lipreading, FLARE serves as a visual encoder coupled with either a lightweight Transformer decoder or an LLM-based decoder. Evaluated on LRS2, LRS3, and the out-of-domain WildVSR benchmark, FLARE achieves state-of-the-art word error rates of 11.7%, 13.2%, and 34.3%, respectively. A progressive design study confirms the contribution of each major component. Further analyses demonstrate that joint face-lip modeling improves robustness under degraded video resolution and large head pose variation, while yielding more phoneme-discriminative visual representations. Code and pretrained models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FLARE-522C.