The paper argues that BLEU-4, the prevailing metric for sign language translation (SLT), may not accurately reflect sign language proficiency because SLT models can exploit spurious correlations and spoken-language priors. By evaluating six SLT models on Phoenix-2014T and CSL-Daily, the authors show that higher BLEU-4 scores do not necessarily indicate better spatio-temporal understanding. They propose a new open-weight LLM QA protocol inspired by language-learning assessment, which better preserves salient content, aligns more closely with human rankings, and reveals differences between gloss-free and gloss-supervised systems that BLEU-4 obscures.
arXiv:2609.07965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sign Language Translation has advanced with deep learning, yet evaluations remain largely signer-dependent, with overlapping signers across train/dev...
SignSeek is a new method for learning transferable sign representations that enables efficient retrieval of signs from dictionaries using only a query video. It employs contrastive learning with saliency‑guided articulator masking, aligning same‑gloss signs across signers while focusing on the single most critical articulator per sign. Trained on 266K samples from multiple sign languages, SignSeek achieves state‑of‑the‑art cross‑corpus retrieval performance and zero‑shot generalisation to unseen British Sign Language, also improving isolated sign recognition and subtitle alignment.
arXiv:2605. 31393v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sign language translation (SLT) remains constrained by the limited availability of paired sign-video/text corpora and by the heavy-tailed vocabularies typical of real-world datasets.
arXiv:2606. 19352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities.
arXiv:2609.12993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the effect of pretrained T5 model scale and explicit motion features on pose-to-text Indian Sign Language Translation (SLT) for the WS...
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.
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.
The paper introduces a reverse sign‑language dictionary that recognizes signs from continuous signing without relying on gloss labels. It does this by first captioning a sign‑level video clip into a free‑form procedural description using an open‑weight vision‑language model, then retrieving the closest entry from a multilingual sentence encoder’s vocabulary of target descriptions. Experiments on a Japanese Sign Language dialogue corpus show that fine‑tuning the captioner boosts seen‑class retrieval from 4.5 % to 49 % and improves unseen‑class retrieval from 11.5 % to 21 %, approaching the performance of a standard closed‑set classifier while enabling open‑vocabulary recognition.
RAIDAL is an active learning framework for continuous sign language recognition that leverages the CTC decoder’s alignment peaks to focus sample selection on gloss‑aligned regions, thereby avoiding temporal redundancy in weakly aligned videos. By restricting representation‑based scoring to these decoder‑aligned gloss areas, RAIDAL improves data efficiency across multiple datasets and architectures, especially in large‑vocabulary, budget‑limited scenarios. The method requires no extra labeling cost and its implementation is publicly available on GitHub.
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.
The paper introduces a reverse sign language dictionary that recognizes signs from continuous signing without relying on gloss annotations. It does this by captioning sign-level video clips into free-form procedural descriptions using an open-weight vision‑language model, then retrieving the closest description from a multilingual sentence encoder’s vocabulary. Experiments on a Japanese Sign Language corpus show that fine‑tuning the captioner boosts seen‑class retrieval from 4.5% to 49% and improves unseen‑class retrieval from 11.5% to 21%, matching or surpassing traditional closed‑set classifiers where applicable.
arXiv:2601.03549v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging cross-modal task requiring joint modeling of manual articulations and non-manual signals. Ex...