# SIGNER: Temporally Grounded Sign Language Generation via Time-Resolved Conditioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07460 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07460/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [Improving Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data by Sign Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12397/) (2021)
- [TEACH: Temporal Action Composition for 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04066/) (2022)
- [Two-Stream Network for Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01367/) (2022)
- [Progressive Transformers for End-to-End Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14874/) (2020)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Training for Multi-Channel Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12405/) (2020)
- [Neural Sign Actors: A diffusion model for 3D sign language production from text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02702/) (2023)
- [The Language of Motion: Unifying Verbal and Non-verbal Language of 3D Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10523/) (2024)
- [MultiAct: Long-Term 3D Human Motion Generation from Multiple Action Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05897/) (2022)
- [G2P-DDM: Generating Sign Pose Sequence from Gloss Sequence with Discrete Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09141/) (2022)
- [T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07119/) (2024)

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

- [SignGPT: Toward LLM-Mediated Sign Language Interaction through Gloss-Free Translation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21709/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sign language generation (SLG), also known as text-to-sign generation, aims to bridge the communication gap between signers and non-signers. Unlike many other generative tasks, SLG must satisfy two fundamental linguistic constraints. First, sign language expresses meaning through a sequence of gestures aligned with word-like units called glosses, and therefore requires correct lexical ordering to preserve intended meaning. Second, each gesture should faithfully reflect the intended gloss (semantic accuracy). Despite recent progress, existing SLG methods frequently produce signs with incorrect lexical order and low semantic accuracy. A common limitation of prior approaches stems from globally fused conditioning strategies, which weaken temporal grounding, the temporal correspondence between glosses and their realized sign segments. This often leads to incorrect lexical order and semantically ambiguous signs. To address this limitation, we propose SIGNER, a SIGN language generation framework with timE-Resolved conditioning to ensure temporal grounding, leveraging a temporal-gloss condition and local temporal fusion (LTF). SIGNER constructs a temporal-gloss condition by estimating a gloss sequence and its durations from input text, and assigning gloss semantics across the temporal dimension. We then introduce LTF, a temporally grounded fusion module that integrates the temporal-gloss condition within a constrained temporal window during denoising. By enforcing temporal locality in condition fusion, LTF preserves temporal grounding, leading to correct lexical ordering and clearer per-gloss semantics. Experiments on Phoenix-2014T and CSL-Daily demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, further supported by motion-smoothness analysis. The project page is available here https://taeryunglee.github.io/projects/signer.
