CLIP-SLA: Parameter-Efficient CLIP Adaptation for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
This work addresses sign language recognition for accessibility applications, but it is incremental as it applies existing parameter-efficient methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled continuous sign language recognition by adapting the CLIP model with parameter-efficient fine-tuning, resulting in two variants that outperformed state-of-the-art models on four datasets with fewer trainable parameters.
Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) focuses on interpreting and transcribing sequences of sign language gestures in videos. In this work, we propose CLIP sign language adaptation (CLIP-SLA), a novel CSLR framework that leverages the powerful pre-trained visual encoder from the CLIP model to sign language tasks through parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We introduce two variants, SLA-Adapter and SLA-LoRA, which integrate PEFT modules into the CLIP visual encoder, enabling fine-tuning with minimal trainable parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed frameworks is validated on four datasets: Phoenix2014, Phoenix2014-T, CSL-Daily, and Isharah-500, where both CLIP-SLA variants outperformed several SOTA models with fewer trainable parameters. Extensive ablation studies emphasize the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed methods with different vision-language models for CSLR. These findings showcase the potential of adapting large-scale pre-trained models for scalable and efficient CSLR, which pave the way for future advancements in sign language understanding.