DeepMind Blog

Putting sign language AI into users’ hands

Introducing sign-language-to-text (SL2T), our breakthrough model powering new sign language features for Deaf and hard of hearing users.

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
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
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

PHOSA: Photorealistic 3D Sign Avatar Modeling and Benchmark

PHOSA presents a photorealistic 3D sign avatar modeling framework that addresses the need for accurate communication with the Deaf community. The authors introduce MVSign, a multi‑view Chinese sign language dataset co‑designed with Deaf experts, and a hybrid fitting pipeline for precise SMPL‑X annotation. Their decoupled avatar representation and motion‑aware sampling achieve high‑fidelity visual results on MVSign and generalize to monocular sign language videos.

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 27

Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences

The paper introduces FS23K, a large-scale British Sign Language fingerspelling dataset created through an iterative annotation framework. It also presents a recognition model that incorporates bi‑manual interactions and mouthing cues, achieving a halved character error rate compared to previous state‑of‑the‑art methods. These results underscore the dataset’s and model’s value for advancing sign language research and automated annotation pipelines.

By Alyssa Chan, Taein Kwon, Andrew Zisserman
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 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