Papers for

sign language app developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Sign language production model adapts timing for natural motions

BLANC: Adaptive Temporal Scheduling for Sign Language Production

Abstract: Sign language production (SLP) aims to synthesize expressive signing motion from written text. Modeling signing motion presents two key temporal challenges. First, fine-grained hand articulations demand higher temporal resolution than relatively slower body movements. Second, signing events unfold over variable durations, calling for adaptive temporal scheduling during generation. To address these challenges, we first introduce a Multi-Rate Vector Quantizer (MRVQ), an articulation-decoupled motion tokenizer that represents the body and both hands as separate discrete streams at distinct temporal resolutions. Building on this representation, we propose BLANC (BLock-wise Adaptive diffusioN with Articulatory Clock), a gloss-free SLP framework that generates variable-duration motion blocks causally while denoising tokens in parallel within each block. At its core, a Latent Articulatory Clock (LAC) learns temporal structure from multi-scale motion-derived partitions to predict block durations and sequence termination during generation. We further introduce inference-time body-conditioned hand refinement to improve coordination across articulators. Extensive experiments on PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily demonstrate that BLANC achieves state-of-the-art performance in sign language production.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Creating realistic sign language from text is hard because different parts of the body move at different speeds. The hands need detailed, fast movements, while the body moves more slowly. The authors designed a method that handles these differences by treating hand and body motions separately and deciding the timing dynamically. Their system, BLANC, learns when to speed up or slow down during signing to make the movements look natural and coordinated. Tests show it outperforms earlier approaches in producing sign language videos.
Open → 2610.24109v1

Hybrid model improves recognition of Indian sign language 12 words

A Hybrid Kinematic GCN and Elastic Transformer for Efficient Indian Sign Language Recognition

Abstract: Sign Language Recognition (SLR) presents complex challenges due to variable signing speeds and spatial intricacies. Specifically, Indian Sign Language (ISL) requires precise modeling of its inherently bimanual nature and is bottlenecked by the scarcity of large-vocabulary benchmarks and the inability of standard models to handle irregular signing velocities. To address this, a structurally-aware hybrid framework for efficient, gloss ISL recognition is proposed. To minimize computational redundancy, an entropy-driven SVD sampler that dynamically extracts informative keyframes is used. Because this subsampling creates irregular physical time gaps, the proposed architecture employs a Continuous Dual Positional Encoding paired with a distance-aware Elastic Transformer to preserve natural signing rhythm. Spatially, a Kinematically-Conditioned Adaptive GCN explicitly models bimanual geometry using unified bone-joint features. To validate our framework, a 120-class, 9,453-video native ISL dataset is created. Augmented by Physical Node Dropout and ArcFace optimization to mitigate subject-specific memorization, our framework achieves a competitive 89.8% accuracy, establishing a strong baseline for complex sign language modeling.

Sat 10 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Recognizing Indian Sign Language is hard because signs involve both hands and vary in speed. The authors created a new method that smartly picks the most important video frames and uses special techniques to keep track of timing and hand movements. They built a dataset of many ISL signs to test their method. Their system recognizes signs with nearly 90% accuracy, showing promise for better sign language technology.
Open → 2610.14680v1

Sign language production improved by natural motion paths on joint manifolds

Naturalness-guided Manifold Flow Matching for Sign Language Production

Abstract: Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to generate sign motions from text. Conditional Flow Matching methods have achieved strong performance in SLP by constructing conditional paths that transform a source distribution into a target distribution. However, existing methods construct these paths via linear interpolation, whereas the rotational geometry of human joints confines valid joint rotations to a manifold embedded in Euclidean space. Consequently, linear interpolation between two sign motions leaves this manifold and ignores the motion distribution on it. In this paper, we revisit SLP from the perspective of manifold transport and propose a Naturalness-guided Manifold Flow Matching framework, termed \textbf{SignNMFlow}, which constructs conditional paths directly on the motion manifold by jointly considering geometric efficiency and the motion distribution. Specifically, we exploit the intrinsic geometry of the manifold and introduce a motion naturalness measure to characterize the motion distribution. By minimizing the kinetic energy under this measure, we learn a naturalness-guided interpolation that couples a closed-form geodesic, which provides geometrically efficient transport, with a learnable deviation that incorporates the motion distribution, thereby significantly improving the fidelity of generated sign motions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of this work.

Sun 27 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Generating sign language from text is hard because human body movements follow complex joint rotations, not simple straight lines. The authors point out that earlier methods used straight-line paths that don’t match how joints actually move. They propose a new approach that follows the true curved space of joint rotations, making sign motions look more natural and accurate. Their method combines mathematical paths with learned adjustments guided by how natural the motions appear.
Open → 2609.33339v1