cs.CVJul 4, 2026

ViPo-MLLM: Visual-Pose Multimodal LLM for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

Authors: Ahmed Abul Hasanaath, Bicheng Xu, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Leonid Sigal, Hamzah Luqman

Organizations: King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, KSA · University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT) translates sign language videos into spoken-language sentences without gloss annotations, avoiding costly labeling but requiring fine-grained modeling of hands, body, and facial cues. Existing methods often use single-modality or weakly fused features, limiting performance. We propose ViPo-MLLM, a framework that integrates spatio-temporal RGB and human pose features. Dedicated encoders model intra-modal dynamics and cross-modal attention captures long-range dependencies. The fused representation is conditioned with a structured prompt and processed by an LLM trained with contrastive and language modeling objectives. The proposed model was evaluated on the PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily datasets and achieved new state-of-the-art results on both datasets. Moreover, the ViPo-MLLM model attained competitive performance compared to gloss-based recognition approaches, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed pose cues and cross-modal attention mechanisms.

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