LoopVSR: A Loop Engineering Framework for Automated Repair of Visual Speech Recognition Inference Pipelines

Abstract

Visual speech recognition (VSR) recovers speech from lip movements when audio is noisy or unavailable. Its multi-stage inference pipeline spans video decoding, mouth-region extraction, preprocessing, model invocation, and decoding, where upstream failures can mask downstream faults. Pipeline maintenance therefore still relies largely on predefined checks and manual debugging. We propose LoopVSR, a Loop Engineering framework that enables a code agent to automatically diagnose and repair VSR inference pipelines using end-to-end execution evidence. It couples constrained repository-level diagnosis and patching with an external controller that audits changes, runs real inference, and accepts or rolls back patches using failures and character error rate (CER). The resulting feedback loop returns newly observed exceptions, tensor statistics, and recognition errors to the agent, progressively exposing faults masked by upstream failures. On the CMLR VSR system, LoopVSR repairs all 11 main faults with 100% mean recovery, whereas the Static guard repairs 2 of 11 with 18.13% mean recovery. It also resolves three cascading tasks in seven accepted iterations and preserves recovery on an independent 200-video hidden set. These results demonstrate that LoopVSR enables measurable, end-to-end automated repair of VSR inference pipelines.