Learning Spoken Language Through Vision

Humans learn spoken language and visual perception at an early age by being immersed in the world around them. Why can't computers do the same? In this talk, I will describe our work to develop methodologies for grounding continuous speech signals at the raw waveform level to natural image scenes. I will first present self-supervised models capable of jointly discovering spoken words and the visual objects to which they refer, all without conventional annotations in either modality. I will show how the representations learned by these models implicitly capture meaningful linguistic structure directly from the speech signal. Finally, I will demonstrate that these models can be applied across multiple languages, and that the visual domain can function as an "interlingua," enabling the discovery of word-level semantic translations at the waveform level.