# Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Adapted Conformer via Unsupervised Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12018 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12018/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [A Survey of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04554/) (2021)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-end Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13830/) (2020)
- [Improving Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data by Sign Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12397/) (2021)
- [Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11858/) (2020)
- [Temporal Pyramid Network for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03548/) (2020)
- [Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2984/) (2014)
- [Two-Stream Network for Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01367/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Aware Multi-modal Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08833/) (2021)
- [Video-based Sign Language Recognition without Temporal Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10111/) (2018)
- [Visual Alignment Constraint for Continuous Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02330/) (2021)
- [A Simple Multi-Modality Transfer Learning Baseline for Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04287/) (2022)
- [Spatial-Temporal Multi-Cue Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03187/) (2020)
- [SignBERT+: Hand-model-aware Self-supervised Pre-training for Sign Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04868/) (2023)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Continuous Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12402/) (2020)

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

- [CSLRConformer: A Data-Centric Conformer Approach for Continuous Arabic Sign Language Recognition on the Isharah Datase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01791/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional Deep Learning frameworks for continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) are comprised of a single or multi-modal feature extractor, a sequence-learning module, and a decoder for outputting the glosses. The sequence learning module is a crucial part wherein transformers have demonstrated their efficacy in the sequence-to-sequence tasks. Analyzing the research progress in the field of Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition, a rapid introduction of various transformer variants is observed. However, in the realm of sign language, experimentation in the sequence learning component is limited. In this work, the state-of-the-art Conformer model for Speech Recognition is adapted for CSLR and the proposed model is termed ConSignformer. This marks the first instance of employing Conformer for a vision-based task. ConSignformer has bimodal pipeline of CNN as feature extractor and Conformer for sequence learning. For improved context learning we also introduce Cross-Modal Relative Attention (CMRA). By incorporating CMRA into the model, it becomes more adept at learning and utilizing complex relationships within the data. To further enhance the Conformer model, unsupervised pretraining called Regressional Feature Extraction is conducted on a curated sign language dataset. The pretrained Conformer is then fine-tuned for the downstream recognition task. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the adopted pretraining strategy and demonstrate how CMRA contributes to the recognition process. Remarkably, leveraging a Conformer-based backbone, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets: PHOENIX-2014 and PHOENIX-2014T.