An Efficient Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation Using Spatial Configurations and Motion Dynamics with LLMs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT) converts sign videos into spoken language sentences without relying on glosses, which are the written representations of signs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable translation performance in gloss-free methods by harnessing their powerful natural language generation capabilities. However, these methods often rely on domain-specific fine-tuning of visual encoders to achieve optimal results. By contrast, we emphasize the importance of capturing the spatial configurations and motion dynamics in sign language. With this in mind, we introduce Spatial and Motion-based Sign Language Translation (SpaMo), a novel LLM-based SLT framework. The core idea of SpaMo is simple yet effective: instead of domain-specific tuning, we use off-the-shelf visual encoders to extract spatial and motion features, which are then input into an LLM along with a language prompt. Additionally, we employ a visual-text alignment process as a lightweight warm-up step before applying SLT supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that SpaMo achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular datasets---PHOENIX14T, CSL-Daily, and How2Sign---without visual fine-tuning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".