{"paper":{"title":"The Lipreading Gap: Do VSR Models Perceive Visual Speech Like Human Lipreaders?","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Naomi Harte, Rishabh Jain","submitted_at":"2026-06-05T16:33:30Z","abstract_excerpt":"Visual speech recognition (VSR) models now surpass human lipreaders on benchmarks, but do such gains establish human-like visual speech perception? To explore this, we compare three VSR systems with human baselines on the MaFI word-level lipreading dataset using word, character, phoneme, and viseme-level metrics. Although models achieve higher overall accuracy, they succeed and fail on different words than humans. A text-only n-gram baseline given only a few initial phonemes rivals human lipreading. VSR word-level errors are consistently better explained by training word frequency than by the "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.07435","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.07435/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}