arXiv Computer Vision

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).

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 AI
Aug 11

Bridging the Gap Between Semantics and Reconstruction:Unifying Sign Language Translation and Production

arXiv:2608. 09045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in sign language (SL) research have shown a trend toward unifying multiple sign language understanding (SLU) subtasks, such as isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), and sign language translation (SLT), within a single framework, leading to substantial progress.

By Xiao Liu, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin, Jiaxin Yin, Bowen Guo, Yaqi Sun, Zhiwei Jiang, Lei Xie
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

M3T: Discrete Multi-Modal Motion Tokens for Sign Language Production

M3T introduces a discrete multi‑modal motion token system for sign language production, addressing the need for non‑manual features such as mouthings, eyebrow raises, gaze, and head movements. The approach couples FLAME’s expressive facial space with SMPL‑X body parameters and uses modality‑specific Finite Scalar Quantization VAEs to achieve high face codebook utilization (99.0%). Trained with an autoregressive transformer and a sign‑to‑text translation objective, M3T outperforms existing methods on three standard datasets, notably improving accuracy on NMFs‑CSL from 49.0% to 58.3% without large‑scale pre‑training.

By Alexandre Symeonidis-Herzig, Jianhe Low, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

Prompting with Sign Parameters for Low-resource Sign Language Instruction Generation

The paper introduces BdSLIG, the first Bengali Sign Language Instruction Generation dataset, aimed at evaluating Vision Language Models on under-resourced SLIG tasks and long-tail visual concepts. It proposes Sign Parameter-Infused (SPI) prompting, which embeds standard sign parameters such as hand shape, motion, and orientation into textual prompts to improve zero-shot performance and produce more structured, reproducible instructions. The work seeks to promote inclusivity and advance sign language learning systems for under-resourced communities.

By Md Tariquzzaman, Md Farhan Ishmam, Saiyma Sittul Muna, Md Kamrul Hasan, Hasan Mahmud
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

Machine Translation for Sign Languages

arXiv:2610.00881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sign language machine translation has progressed substantially over the past decade, evolving from isolated sign recognition to end-to-end translation...

By Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Anton Pelykh, Edward Fish, Harry Walsh, JianHe Low, Karahan Sahin, Oline Ranum, Sobhan Asasi, Steven Emery, Richard Bowden
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SignBind-LLM: Multi-Stage Modality Fusion for Sign Language Translation

SignBind-LLM introduces a modular framework for sign language translation that separates continuous signing, fingerspelling, and lipreading into dedicated expert streams. Each expert is pre‑trained independently on about two million pseudo‑gloss sequences, eliminating the need for manual gloss annotation. A lightweight transformer fuses the expert outputs, and a pre‑trained language model converts the fused pseudo‑glosses into fluent English, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on multiple benchmarks with lower training cost.

By Marshall Thomas, Edward Fish, Richard Bowden
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Direct Translation between Sign Languages

arXiv:2605.20588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sign language translation has made substantial progress between sign and spoken languages, while translation across sign languages remains less exp...

By Zetian Wu, Bowen Xie, Wuyang Meng, Milan Gautam, Stefan Lee, Liang Huang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

PHOSA: Photorealistic 3D Sign Avatar Modeling and Benchmark

PHOSA introduces MVSign, the first multi‑view Chinese sign language dataset co‑designed with Deaf experts, featuring diverse gestures and rich annotations. The authors develop a hybrid fitting pipeline for accurate SMPL‑X annotation and propose a decoupled sign avatar representation that isolates body, head, and hand components, coupled with a motion‑aware sampling strategy to handle motion blur and balance gesture diversity. Experiments show high‑fidelity visual results on MVSign, especially in detailed hand and facial regions, and good generalization to in‑the‑wild monocular sign language videos.

By Haodong Wang, Hezhen Hu, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

SignRR: Retrieve and Refine Real Motion for Sign Language Production

SignRR is a new sign language production framework that combines retrieval of real sign motion segments with a learned refinement step to produce globally coherent signing sequences. It starts from a dictionary of authentic sign segments and refines them using a part-aware Residual VQ‑VAE, preserving fine hand articulation while handling temporal length differences in latent space. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and CSL‑Daily demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art back‑translation performance and competitive pose quality.

By Fidel Omar Tito Cruz, Angie Sanchez Marquina, Summy Farfan, Gissella Bejarano
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