Leveraging the Power of MLLMs for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Sign language translation (SLT) is a challenging task that involves translating sign language images into spoken language. For SLT models to perform this task successfully, they must bridge the modality gap and identify subtle variations in sign language components to understand their meanings accurately. To address these challenges, we propose a novel gloss-free SLT framework called Multimodal Sign Language Translation (MMSLT), which leverages the representational capabilities of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we use MLLMs to generate detailed textual descriptions of sign language components. Then, through our proposed multimodal-language pre-training module, we integrate these description features with sign video features to align them within the spoken sentence space. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily, highlighting the potential of MLLMs to be utilized effectively in SLT. Code is available at https://github.com/hwjeon98/MMSLT.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 43 of its 67 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2024.
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43 of 67 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 11.
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- 2026Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation: An Unbiased Evaluation of Progress in the Fieldcited by 9
- 2026MaDiS: Taming Masked Diffusion Language Models for Sign Language Generationcited by 4
- 2025Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language Translationcited by 1
- 2025Bangla Sign Language Translation: Dataset Creation Challenges, Benchmarking and Prospectscited by 1
- 2026SignAgent: Agentic LLMs for Linguistically-Grounded Sign Language Annotation and Dataset Curationcited by 1
- 2026SIGNET: Motion-Level Knowledge Transfer for Cross-Language Sign Language Translationcited by 1
- 2026Towards Multi-View Sign Language Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselinecited by 0
- 2026Direct Translation between Sign Languagescited by 0
- 2026SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translationcited by 0
- 2026ViPo-MLLM: Visual-Pose Multimodal LLM for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translationcited by 0
- 2026Q-BridgeNet: A Quantization Network for Cross-Lingual Sign Language Translationcited by 0
- 2026SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spottingcited by 0
1 more
- 2026Beyond BLEU: A Case for Redefining Sign Language Translation Benchmarks3 Sep 2026
- 2026SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting26 Aug 2026
- 2026Q-BridgeNet: A Quantization Network for Cross-Lingual Sign Language Translation13 Jul 2026
- 2026ViPo-MLLM: Visual-Pose Multimodal LLM for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation4 Jul 2026
- 2026SIGNET: Motion-Level Knowledge Transfer for Cross-Language Sign Language Translation26 Jun 2026
- 2026SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation2 Jun 2026
- 2026Direct Translation between Sign Languages20 May 2026
- 2026Towards Multi-View Sign Language Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline20 Apr 2026
- 2026SignAgent: Agentic LLMs for Linguistically-Grounded Sign Language Annotation and Dataset Curation19 Mar 2026
- 2026Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation: An Unbiased Evaluation of Progress in the Field18 Feb 2026
- 2026MaDiS: Taming Masked Diffusion Language Models for Sign Language Generation27 Jan 2026
- 2025Bangla Sign Language Translation: Dataset Creation Challenges, Benchmarking and Prospects26 Nov 2025
1 more
- 2026Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation: An Unbiased Evaluation of Progress in the Fieldcited by 9
- 2025Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language Translationcited by 1
- 2025Bangla Sign Language Translation: Dataset Creation Challenges, Benchmarking and Prospectscited by 1
- 2026SIGNET: Motion-Level Knowledge Transfer for Cross-Language Sign Language Translationcited by 1
- 2026Towards Multi-View Sign Language Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselinecited by 0
- 2026Direct Translation between Sign Languagescited by 0
- 2026SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translationcited by 0
- 2026Q-BridgeNet: A Quantization Network for Cross-Lingual Sign Language Translationcited by 0
- 2026SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spottingcited by 0
- 2026Beyond BLEU: A Case for Redefining Sign Language Translation Benchmarkscited by 0
- 2026Beyond BLEU: A Case for Redefining Sign Language Translation Benchmarks3 Sep 2026
- 2026SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting26 Aug 2026
- 2026Q-BridgeNet: A Quantization Network for Cross-Lingual Sign Language Translation13 Jul 2026
- 2026SIGNET: Motion-Level Knowledge Transfer for Cross-Language Sign Language Translation26 Jun 2026
- 2026SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation2 Jun 2026
- 2026Direct Translation between Sign Languages20 May 2026
- 2026Towards Multi-View Sign Language Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline20 Apr 2026
- 2026Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation: An Unbiased Evaluation of Progress in the Field18 Feb 2026
- 2025Bangla Sign Language Translation: Dataset Creation Challenges, Benchmarking and Prospects26 Nov 2025
- 2025Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language Translation11 Nov 2025
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- 2025RVLF: A Reinforcing Vision-Language Framework for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation
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