Sen Fang

Sen Fang, Chunyu Sui, Yanghao Zhou et al.

In this paper, we propose a dual-condition diffusion pre-training model named SignDiff that can generate human sign language speakers from a skeleton pose. SignDiff has a novel Frame Reinforcement Network called FR-Net, similar to dense human pose estimation work, which enhances the correspondence between text lexical symbols and sign language dense pose frames, reduces the occurrence of multiple fingers in the diffusion model. In addition, we propose a new method for American Sign Language Production (ASLP), which can generate ASL skeletal pose videos from text input, integrating two new improved modules and a new loss function to improve the accuracy and quality of sign language skeletal posture and enhance the ability of the model to train on large-scale data. We propose the first baseline for ASL production and report the scores of 17.19 and 12.85 on BLEU-4 on the How2Sign dev/test sets. We evaluated our model on the previous mainstream dataset PHOENIX14T, and the experiments achieved the SOTA results. In addition, our image quality far exceeds all previous results by 10 percentage points in terms of SSIM.

Sizhou Chen, Songyang Gao, Sen Fang

The Transformer architecture has proven to be highly effective for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks, becoming a foundational component for a plethora of research in the domain. Historically, many approaches have leaned on fixed-length attention windows, which becomes problematic for varied speech samples in duration and complexity, leading to data over-smoothing and neglect of essential long-term connectivity. Addressing this limitation, we introduce Echo-MSA, a nimble module equipped with a variable-length attention mechanism that accommodates a range of speech sample complexities and durations. This module offers the flexibility to extract speech features across various granularities, spanning from frames and phonemes to words and discourse. The proposed design captures the variable length feature of speech and addresses the limitations of fixed-length attention. Our evaluation leverages a parallel attention architecture complemented by a dynamic gating mechanism that amalgamates traditional attention with the Echo-MSA module output. Empirical evidence from our study reveals that integrating Echo-MSA into the primary model's training regime significantly enhances the word error rate (WER) performance, all while preserving the intrinsic stability of the original model.

Sen Fang, Chen Chen, Lei Wang et al.

In this paper, we propose SignLLM, a multilingual Sign Language Production (SLP) large language model, which includes two novel multilingual SLP modes MLSF and Prompt2LangGloss that allow sign language gestures generation from query texts input and question-style prompts input respectively. Both modes can use a new RL loss based on reinforcement learning and a new RL module named Priority Learning Channel. These RL components can accelerate the training by enhancing the model's capability to sample high-quality data. To train SignLLM, we introduce Prompt2Sign, a comprehensive multilingual sign language dataset, which builds from public data, including American Sign Language (ASL) and seven others. This dataset standardizes information by extracting pose information from sign language videos into a unified compressed format. We extensively evaluate SignLLM, demonstrating that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SLP tasks across eight sign languages.