Chang Hao Lai
2026
Selective Contrastive Learning For Gloss Free Sign Language Translation
Chang Hao Lai | Rui Zhao | Xuewen Zhong | Jinsong Su | Yidong Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chang Hao Lai | Rui Zhao | Xuewen Zhong | Jinsong Su | Yidong Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Sign language translation (SLT) converts continuous sign videos into spoken-language text, yet it remains challenging due to the intrinsic modality mismatch between visual signs and written text, particularly in gloss-free settings. Recent SLT systems increasingly adopt CLIP-like Vision-Language pretraining (VLP) for cross-modal alignment, but the random in-batch contrast provides few, batch-dependent negatives and may mislabel semantically similar (or even identical) pairs as negatives, introducing noisy and potentially inconsistent alignment supervision.In this work, we first conduct a preliminary trajectory-based analysis that tracks negative video-text similarity over training. The results show that only a small subset of negatives exhibits the desired behavior of being consistently pushed away, while the remaining negatives display heterogeneous and often non-decreasing similarity dynamics, suggesting that random in-batch negatives are frequently uninformative for effective alignment.Inspired by this, we propose Selective Contrastive Learning for SLT (SCL-SLT) with a Pair Selection (PS) strategy. PS scores candidate negatives using similarity dynamics from reference checkpoints and constructs mini-batches via a curriculum that progressively emphasizes more challenging negatives, thereby strengthening contrastive supervision while reducing the influence of noisy or semantically invalid negatives.