Rethinking Sign Language Translation: The Impact of Signer Dependence on Model Evaluation
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SignRAG is a unified framework for gloss‑free sign language translation that combines hierarchical pretraining, target‑domain retrieval augmentation, and retrieval‑aware reinforcement fine‑tuning. It first learns linguistically grounded sign representations, aligns a sign encoder with a decoder‑only large language model, and then uses a retrieval gallery to provide instance‑specific translation cues. Retrieval Utility‑Guided Reinforcement Fine‑Tuning (RUG‑RFT) balances translation quality and retrieval usefulness, leading to state‑of‑the‑art results, including the first gloss‑free approach to outperform gloss‑supervised methods on CSL‑Daily.
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.
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: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.
arXiv:2608. 09006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks.
arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.