Geo-Sign: Hyperbolic Contrastive Regularisation for Geometrically Aware Sign Language Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fish, Edward, Bowden, Richard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fish, Edward
Bowden, Richard
author_facet Fish, Edward
Bowden, Richard
contents Recent progress in Sign Language Translation (SLT) has focussed primarily on improving the representational capacity of large language models to incorporate Sign Language features. This work explores an alternative direction: enhancing the geometric properties of skeletal representations themselves. We propose Geo-Sign, a method that leverages the properties of hyperbolic geometry to model the hierarchical structure inherent in sign language kinematics. By projecting skeletal features derived from Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) into the Poincaré ball model, we aim to create more discriminative embeddings, particularly for fine-grained motions like finger articulations. We introduce a hyperbolic projection layer, a weighted Fréchet mean aggregation scheme, and a geometric contrastive loss operating directly in hyperbolic space. These components are integrated into an end-to-end translation framework as a regularisation function, to enhance the representations within the language model. This work demonstrates the potential of hyperbolic geometry to improve skeletal representations for Sign Language Translation, improving on SOTA RGB methods while preserving privacy and improving computational efficiency. Code available here: https://github.com/ed-fish/geo-sign.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00129
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geo-Sign: Hyperbolic Contrastive Regularisation for Geometrically Aware Sign Language Translation
Fish, Edward
Bowden, Richard
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Recent progress in Sign Language Translation (SLT) has focussed primarily on improving the representational capacity of large language models to incorporate Sign Language features. This work explores an alternative direction: enhancing the geometric properties of skeletal representations themselves. We propose Geo-Sign, a method that leverages the properties of hyperbolic geometry to model the hierarchical structure inherent in sign language kinematics. By projecting skeletal features derived from Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) into the Poincaré ball model, we aim to create more discriminative embeddings, particularly for fine-grained motions like finger articulations. We introduce a hyperbolic projection layer, a weighted Fréchet mean aggregation scheme, and a geometric contrastive loss operating directly in hyperbolic space. These components are integrated into an end-to-end translation framework as a regularisation function, to enhance the representations within the language model. This work demonstrates the potential of hyperbolic geometry to improve skeletal representations for Sign Language Translation, improving on SOTA RGB methods while preserving privacy and improving computational efficiency. Code available here: https://github.com/ed-fish/geo-sign.
title Geo-Sign: Hyperbolic Contrastive Regularisation for Geometrically Aware Sign Language Translation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00129