Towards Compact Sign Language Translation: Frame Rate and Model Size Trade-offs
Sign Language Translation (SLT) converts sign language videos into spoken-language text, bridging communication between Deaf and hearing communities. Current gloss-free approaches rely on large encoder-decoder models, limiting deployment. We propose a compact 77M-parameter pipeline that couples MMPose skeletal pose extraction with a single linear projection into T5-small. By varying the input frame rate, we expose a practical efficiency trade-off: at 12 fps the model halves its sequence length, achieving a 75% reduction in encoder quadratic self-attention computational complexity while incurring only a modest BLEU-4 drop (9.53 vs. 10.06 at 24 fps on How2Sign). Our system is roughly 3x sma...
| Authors | Kuanwei Chen, Mengfeng Tsai |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 May 2026 |
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