PHOSA: Photorealistic 3D Sign Avatar Modeling and Benchmark

Existing 3D sign language avatar reconstruction methods are developed and evaluated exclusively on Western sign languages, and no 3D parametric annotations exist for any Arabic Sign Language dataset, a gap that blocks the development of avatar-based accessibility applications for the Arab Deaf community. We release the first SMPL-X parametric annotations for the Ishara-500 Saudi Sign Language dataset, enabling quantitative evaluation and downstream sign language generation for Arabic Sign Language. We introduce Tamaththul3D, a reconstruction pipeline that aligns hand and body estimates through geometric inverse kinematics on the forearm chain followed by 2D-supervised shoulder refinement. The closed-form integration is decoupled from the specific choice of body and hand estimators: any SMPL-X-compatible body estimator and any MANO-compatible hand estimator can be substituted, as we demonstrate by swapping each module independently. Tamaththul3D achieves up to 32% lower hand error than prior methods, runs 32x faster than the strongest baseline, and generalizes across five typologically distinct sign languages without dataset-specific adaptation.

Sign language production requires more than hand motion generation. Non-manual features, including mouthings, eyebrow raises, gaze, and head movements, are grammatically obligatory and cannot be recovered from manual articulators alone. Existing 3D production systems face two barriers to integrating them: the body-model fittings they train on retain a facial space too low-dimensional to encode these articulations, and, if richer representations are adopted, standard discrete tokenization suffers from codebook collapse, leaving most of the expression space largely unreachable. We propose SMPL-FX, which couples FLAME's rich expression space with the SMPL-X body parameterisation, and tokenize the resulting representation with modality-specific Finite Scalar Quantization VAEs for body, hands, and face, raising face codebook utilization from 78.8% to 99.0%. M3T is an autoregressive transformer trained on this multi-modal motion vocabulary, with an auxiliary sign-to-text translation objective that encourages semantically grounded embeddings. Across three standard datasets, M3T achieves state-of-the-art sign language production quality, and on NMFs-CSL, where signs are distinguishable only by non-manual features, our model reaches 58.3% accuracy against 49.0% for the strongest comparable baseline, without large-scale sign-language pre-training. Project page: https://cogvis-cvssp.github.io/papers/m3t/

Sign language is the primary language for many Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) signers, yet most conversational AI systems still mediate interaction through spoken or written language. This spoken-language-centered interface can limit access for signers for whom spoken or written language is not the most accessible medium, motivating direct sign-to-sign conversational modeling. However, sentence-level sign video data are expensive to collect and annotate, leaving existing sign translation and production models with limited vocabulary coverage and weak open-domain generalization. We address this bottleneck by constructing continuous sign conversations from isolated signs: large-scale labeled isolated clips are collected as lexically grounded motion primitives and recomposed into sign-language-ordered utterances derived from existing dialogue corpora. We introduce SignaVox-W, which provides, to our knowledge, the largest labeled isolated-sign vocabulary to date, and SignaVox-U, a continuous 3D sign conversation dataset built from SignaVox-W. To bridge structural mismatch between spoken and signed languages, we use a retrieval-guided spoken-to-gloss translator; to bridge independently collected isolated clips, we propose BRAID, a diffusion Transformer that performs duration alignment and co-articulatory boundary inpainting. With the resulting data, we train SignaVox, a direct sign-to-sign conversational model that generates 3D body, hand, and facial motion responses from prior signing context without spoken-language text or externally provided glosses at inference time. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show improved isolated-to-continuous motion quality, stronger response-level semantic alignment, and scalable signer-centered interaction that better supports visual-spatial articulation.