Logo image
Geo-Sign: Hyperbolic Contrastive Regularisation for Geometrically Aware Sign Language Translation
Conference proceeding   Open access   Peer reviewed

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

Edward Fish and Richard Bowden
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 39: 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), Vol.38(Main conference), pp.99293-99330
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (San Diego, CA, USA, 01/12/2025–06/12/2025)
2025

Abstract

American Sign Language Computer Vision Differential Geometry Geometry Machine Learning Sign Language

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. 

pdf
Hyper_Sign_Neurips5.61 MBDownloadView
Author's Accepted Manuscript Open Access CC BY V4.0
url
https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2025View
Event Website Conference website

Metrics

85 File views/ downloads
48 Record Views

Details

Logo image

Usage Policy