# DexAvatar: 3D Sign Language Reconstruction with Hand and Body Pose Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21054 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21054/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11006/) (2019)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [How2Sign: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset for Continuous American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08143/) (2020)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05301/) (2021)
- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Progressive Transformers for End-to-End Sign Language Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14874/) (2020)
- [AUTSL: A Large Scale Multi-modal Turkish Sign Language Dataset and Baseline Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00932/) (2020)
- [HaWoR: World-Space Hand Motion Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02973/) (2025)
- [Mixed SIGNals: Sign Language Production via a Mixture of Motion Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11317/) (2021)
- [Neural Sign Actors: A diffusion model for 3D sign language production from text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02702/) (2023)
- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [AiOS: All-in-One-Stage Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17934/) (2024)
- [A Linearly-Convergent Stochastic L-BFGS Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02087/) (2015)
- [ACR: Attention Collaboration-based Regressor for Arbitrary Two-Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05938/) (2023)

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

- [Tamaththul3D: High-Fidelity 3D Saudi Sign Language Avatars from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05367/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The trend in sign language generation is centered around data-driven generative methods that require vast amounts of precise 2D and 3D human pose data to achieve an acceptable generation quality. However, currently, most sign language datasets are video-based and limited to automatically reconstructed 2D human poses (i.e., keypoints) and lack accurate 3D information. Furthermore, existing state-of-the-art for automatic 3D human pose estimation from sign language videos is prone to self-occlusion, noise, and motion blur effects, resulting in poor reconstruction quality. In response to this, we introduce DexAvatar, a novel framework to reconstruct bio-mechanically accurate fine-grained hand articulations and body movements from in-the-wild monocular sign language videos, guided by learned 3D hand and body priors. DexAvatar achieves strong performance in the SGNify motion capture dataset, the only benchmark available for this task, reaching an improvement of 35.11% in the estimation of body and hand poses compared to the state-of-the-art. The official website of this work is: https://github.com/kaustesseract/DexAvatar.