Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation

Zhigang Chen, Benjia Zhou, Jun Li, Jun Wan, Zhen Lei, Ning Jiang, Quan Lu, Guoqing Zhao


Abstract
Previous Sign Language Translation (SLT) methods achieve superior performance by relying on gloss annotations. However, labeling high-quality glosses is a labor-intensive task, which limits the further development of SLT. Although some approaches work towards gloss-free SLT through jointly training the visual encoder and translation network, these efforts still suffer from poor performance and inefficient use of the powerful Large Language Model (LLM). Most seriously, we find that directly introducing LLM into SLT will lead to insufficient learning of visual representations as LLM dominates the learning curve. To address these problems, we propose Factorized Learning assisted with Large Language Model (FLa-LLM) for gloss-free SLT. Concretely, we factorize the training process into two stages. In the visual initialing stage, we employ a lightweight translation model after the visual encoder to pre-train the visual encoder. In the LLM fine-tuning stage, we freeze the acquired knowledge in the visual encoder and integrate it with a pre-trained LLM to inspire the LLM’s translation potential. This factorized training strategy proves to be highly effective as evidenced by significant improvements achieved across three SLT datasets which are all conducted under the gloss-free setting.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.620
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
7071–7081
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.620
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhigang Chen, Benjia Zhou, Jun Li, Jun Wan, Zhen Lei, Ning Jiang, Quan Lu, and Guoqing Zhao. 2024. Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 7071–7081, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (Chen et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.620.pdf