# A Transformer-Based Contrastive Learning Approach for Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [Video Action Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02707/) (2018)
- [Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-end Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13830/) (2020)
- [Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11006/) (2019)
- [learn2learn: A Library for Meta-Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12284/) (2020)
- [Skeletor: Skeletal Transformers for Robust Body-Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11712/) (2021)
- [Towards Zero-shot Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05914/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SSL-SLR: Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05188/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sign language recognition from monocular video or 2D pose sequences is challenging, both because 3D information must be inferred from 2D observations and because the signal is inherently spatiotemporal. Moreover, the large and continually growing vocabulary of signs in production settings makes conventional closed-set classification impractical: adding a class requires new labeled data and retraining. We propose a contrastive Transformer-based model that learns rich representations of body key-point sequences, enabling direct comparison between embedding vectors. These representations support one-shot and few-shot tasks such as classification of signs never seen during training. On the LSA64 dataset, using only 48 classes for representation learning, the model reaches 88.4% accuracy on 16 held-out classes with as few as eight reference examples per class, and its accuracy improves consistently with the number of training classes and support examples.