Lost in Translation, Found in Embeddings: Sign Language Translation and Alignment
VGG, University of Oxford(Oxford大学视觉几何组);KAIST(韩国科学技术院);University of Zurich(苏黎世大学);LIGM, École des Ponts, IP Paris, UGE, CNRS(图像是巴黎理工学院的LIGM实验室、UGE、CNRS)
Youngjoon Jang, Liliane Momeni, Zifan Jiang, Joon Son Chung, Gül Varol, Andrew Zisserman
Our aim is to develop a unified model for sign language understanding, that performs sign language translation (SLT) and sign-subtitle alignment (SSA). Together, these two tasks enable the conversion of continuous signing videos into spoken language text and also the temporal alignment of signing with subtitles -- both essential for practical communication, large-scale corpus construction, and educational applications. To achieve this, our approach is built upon three components: (i) a lightweight visual backbone that captures manual and non-manual cues from human keypoints and lip-region images while preserving signer privacy; (ii) a Sliding Perceiver mapping network that aggregates consecutive visual features into word-level embeddings to bridge the vision-text gap; and (iii) a multi-task scalable training strategy that jointly optimises SLT and SSA, reinforcing both linguistic and temporal alignment. To promote cross-linguistic generalisation, we pretrain our model on large-scale sign-text corpora covering British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) from the BOBSL and YouTube-SL-25 datasets. With this multilingual pretraining and strong model design, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the challenging BOBSL (BSL) dataset for both SLT and SSA. Our model also demonstrates robust zero-shot generalisation and finetuned SLT performance on How2Sign (ASL), highlighting the potential of scalable translation across different sign languages.
Lost in Translation, Found in Context: Sign Language Translation with Contextual Cues
University of Oxford(牛津大学);KAIST(韩国科学技术院);École des Ponts(巴黎路桥学院);IP Paris(巴黎理工学院);Univ Gustave Eiffel(Gustave Eiffel大学);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);IIIT Hyderabad(海得拉巴国际信息技术学院)
Lost in Translation? Vocabulary Alignment for Source-Free Adaptation in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
The Good AI Lab(好AI实验室);ETH Zurich(苏黎世联邦理工学院);AMD Silo AI;Google(谷歌);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑技术大学);INSAIT, Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski(INSAIT,索菲亚大学,圣克莱孟·奥赫里茨基);University of Bologna(博洛尼亚大学)
Lost in Visual Translation: A VLM-Assisted Perceptual-Semantic Coherence Framework for EEG-to-Image Reconstruction
Mahindra University(马欣德拉大学);MU-VT Interdisciplinary Advanced Research Centre for Transformative Technologies, Mahindra University(马欣德拉大学MU-VT变革性技术跨学科高级研究中心)
Due to the enormous population growth of cities in recent years, objects are frequently lost and unclaimed on public transportation, in restaurants, or any other public areas. While services like Find My iPhone can easily identify lost electronic devices, more valuable objects cannot be tracked in an intelligent manner, making it impossible for administrators to reclaim a large number of lost and found items in a timely manner. We present a method that significantly reduces the complexity of searching by comparing previous images of lost and recovered things provided by the owner with photos t…
There is an undeniable communication barrier between deaf people and people with normal hearing ability. Although innovations in sign language translation technology aim to tear down this communication barrier, the majority of existing sign language translation systems are either intrusive or constrained by resolution or ambient lighting conditions. Moreover, these existing systems can only perform single-sign ASL translation rather than sentence-level translation, making them much less useful in daily-life communication scenarios. In this work, we fill this critical gap by presenting DeepASL,…
We propose a sign language translation system based on human keypoint estimation. It is well-known that many problems in the field of computer vision require a massive amount of dataset to train deep neural network models. The situation is even worse when it comes to the sign language translation problem as it is far more difficult to collect high-quality training data. In this paper, we introduce the KETI (short for Korea Electronics Technology Institute) sign language dataset which consists of 14,672 videos of high resolution and quality. Considering the fact that each country has a differen…
Sign language translation as a kind of technology with profound social significance has attracted growing researchers' interest in recent years. However, the existing sign language translation methods need to read all the videos before starting the translation, which leads to a high inference latency and also limits their application in real-life scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose SimulSLT, the first end-to-end simultaneous sign language translation model, which can translate sign language videos into target text concurrently. SimulSLT is composed of a text decoder, a boundary predic…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学);Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center(合肥综合性国家科学中心)
Despite existing pioneering works on sign language translation (SLT), there is a non-trivial obstacle, i.e., the limited quantity of parallel sign-text data. To tackle this parallel data bottleneck, we propose a sign back-translation (SignBT) approach, which incorporates massive spoken language texts into SLT training. With a text-to-gloss translation model, we first back-translate the monolingual text to its gloss sequence. Then, the paired sign sequence is generated by splicing pieces from an estimated gloss-to-sign bank at the feature level. Finally, the synthetic parallel data serves as a …
Existing work on sign language translation - that is, translation from sign language videos into sentences in a written language - has focused mainly on (1) data collected in a controlled environment or (2) data in a specific domain, which limits the applicability to real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce OpenASL, a large-scale American Sign Language (ASL) - English dataset collected from online video sites (e.g., YouTube). OpenASL contains 288 hours of ASL videos in multiple domains from over 200 signers and is the largest publicly available ASL translation dataset to date. To tackl…
Prior work on Sign Language Translation has shown that having a mid-level sign gloss representation (effectively recognizing the individual signs) improves the translation performance drastically. In fact, the current state-of-the-art in translation requires gloss level tokenization in order to work. We introduce a novel transformer based architecture that jointly learns Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation while being trainable in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by using a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to bind the recognition and translation problems …
Sign Language Translation (SLT) first uses a Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system to extract sign language glosses from videos. Then, a translation system generates spoken language translations from the sign language glosses. This paper focuses on the translation system and introduces the STMC-Transformer which improves on the current state-of-the-art by over 5 and 7 BLEU respectively on gloss-to-text and video-to-text translation of the PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset. On the ASLG-PC12 corpus, we report an increase of over 16 BLEU. We also demonstrate the problem in current methods that rely …
From Rule-Based Models to Deep Learning Transformers Architectures for Natural Language Processing and Sign Language Translation Systems: Survey, Taxonomy and Performance Evaluation
United Arab Emirates University(阿联酋大学);Emirates Center for Mobility Research(阿联酋移动性研究中心)