Papers › Sign Language Translation with Iterative Prototype

Sign Language Translation with Iterative Prototype

23 Aug 2023ICCV 2023 1arXiv:2308.12191archive 2025-07-28

Huijie Yao, Wengang Zhou, Hao Feng, Hezhen Hu, Hao Zhou, Houqiang Li

This paper presents IP-SLT, a simple yet effective framework for sign language translation (SLT). Our IP-SLT adopts a recurrent structure and enhances the semantic representation (prototype) of the input sign language video via an iterative refinement manner. Our idea mimics the behavior of human reading, where a sentence can be digested repeatedly, till reaching accurate understanding. Technically, IP-SLT consists of feature extraction, prototype initialization, and iterative prototype refinement. The initialization module generates the initial prototype based on the visual feature extracted by the feature extraction module. Then, the iterative refinement module leverages the cross-attention mechanism to polish the previous prototype by aggregating it with the original video feature. Through repeated refinement, the prototype finally converges to a more stable and accurate state, leading to a fluent and appropriate translation. In addition, to leverage the sequential dependence of prototypes, we further propose an iterative distillation loss to compress the knowledge of the final iteration into previous ones. As the autoregressive decoding process is executed only once in inference, our IP-SLT is ready to improve various SLT systems with acceptable overhead. Extensive experiments are conducted on public benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the IP-SLT.

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Tasks

SentenceSign Language TranslationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sign Language Translation CSL-Daily IP-SLT BLEU-4 16.72 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

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