arXiv Computer Vision

Attention-Steered Vision-Language Models for Sign Language Translation

The paper introduces AttnSign, a vision‑language model that improves sign language translation by steering spatial‑temporal attention. It first supervises attention on sign‑relevant regions such as faces and hands in each frame, then uses an RL‑based motion‑cadence method to focus on keyframes. Experiments on How2Sign and OpenASL show AttnSign consistently outperforms existing methods.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

ViPo-MLLM: Visual-Pose Multimodal LLM for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

arXiv:2607. 03657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT) translates sign language videos into spoken-language sentences without gloss annotations, avoiding costly labeling but requiring fine-grained modeling of hands, body, and facial cues.

By Ahmed Abul Hasanaath, Bicheng Xu, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Leonid Sigal, Hamzah Luqman
arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

Seeing Semantic Shift: Difference-Aware Sentence-Level Temporal Segmentation of Sign Language Videos

The paper introduces SignShift, a framework for visual-only sentence-level segmentation of continuous sign language videos. It uses a Temporal Difference Module that captures frame-to-frame feature variations across full-frame, facial, and hand cues, and a Segment Count Prediction module to guide boundary selection. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that SignShift outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its effectiveness for this challenging task.

By Bowen Guo, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin, Xiao Liu, Kuizhuang Liu, Zhiwei Jiang, Lei Xie
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting

SMART is a new framework that jointly tackles continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) and spotting by leveraging a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to generate motion descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues. It performs stable video‑text alignment with small batch sizes and introduces a Multi‑Scale Temporal Adapter to capture temporal interactions during transformer encoding. The framework also incorporates CSFormer, a CSLR‑guided spotting module that injects recognition‑derived gloss evidence into a boundary‑aware spotting network, enabling mutual benefit between recognition and spotting tasks.

By Eunjee Choi, JungHoon Sung, Seongwhan Cho, Chu Xin, Younggeun Choi
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Stack Transformer Based Spatial-Temporal Attention Model for Dynamic Sign Language and Fingerspelling Recognition

The paper introduces the Sequential Spatio-Temporal Attention Network (SSTAN), a Transformer-based architecture that replaces traditional Graph Convolutional Networks for sign language recognition. SSTAN uses a hierarchical, stacked design with Spatial Multi-Head Attention to model joint relationships within frames and Temporal Multi-Head Attention to capture long-range dependencies across frames, eliminating the need for predefined skeletal graphs. Experiments on large-scale datasets (WLASL, JSL, KSL) show that SSTAN, trained from scratch, achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance in fingerspelling categories and outperforms other skeleton‑only methods on WLASL, highlighting its data efficiency and ability to learn complex spatio‑temporal patterns.

By Koki Hirooka, Abu Saleh Musa Miah, Tatsuya Murakami, Md. Al Mehedi Hasan, Yong Seok Hwang, Jungpil Shin
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

SignMatch: Matching Dictionary Signs to Continuous Sign Language Video

SignMatch introduces a prototype‑structured embedding space that learns to match dictionary sign videos with continuous sign language footage based solely on visual similarity of handshape and motion. By mapping isolated dictionary exemplars into this space, the method enables direct, embedding‑based sign matching and can generalise to unseen signs using only dictionary examples. Experiments on ASL‑Citizen, ChaLearn OSLWL, and BOBSL CSLR2 benchmarks show strong cross‑dataset, cross‑task, and cross‑language performance, outperforming prior approaches on American, British, and Spanish sign languages without benchmark‑specific supervision.

By Ryan Wong, Youngjoon Jang, Liliane Momeni, G\"ul Varol, Andrew Zisserman
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

SignMimic: Robust High-Quality Sign Language Motion Generation via Human-Shape-Oblivious Pose Transfer Guidance

arXiv:2609.14122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the challenge of sign language video mimicking: given a driving video and a single reference frame, synthesize a video where the target signer...

By Zhewen He (New York University Abu Dhabi), Junyi Yu (New York University Abu Dhabi), Haomian Huang (New York University Abu Dhabi), Zhenhua Li (ChatSign Technology), Yi Fang (New York University Abu Dhabi, ChatSign Technology)
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

SignGPT: Toward LLM-Mediated Sign Language Interaction through Gloss-Free Translation and Generation

SignGPT is a unified, pose‑based framework that performs gloss‑free sign language translation (SLT) and generation (SLG) by integrating part‑aware hierarchical representations of body, hand, and facial motion into a shared language model. It uses asymmetric multi‑token prediction and progressive training for bidirectional modeling, and is evaluated on How2Sign (ASL) and Phoenix‑2014T (DGS) with benchmark comparisons, qualitative analyses, and component ablations. An exploratory study with 12 Deaf ASL signers demonstrates a sign‑to‑sign response pipeline, suggesting that unified modeling can support sign language conversation (SLC).

By Ronghui Li, Jun Dong, Zhongyuan Hu, Zunnan Xu, Jun Zhou, Liyuan Chen, Shuoling Liu, Jiangpeng Yan, Jie Guo, Xiu Li, Linchao Bao