ODE-Based Transformer Decoders for Iterative Sign Language Translation
This work addresses the high computational cost and low parameter efficiency of current sign language translation models, which often rely on scaling up model size for performance gains. The authors propose a novel reconstruction of the Transformer decoder from the perspective of ordinary differential equations (ODEs), introducing higher-order numerical integration schemes—such as Runge-Kutta methods RK-2 and RK-4—into sign language translation for the first time. This approach replaces conventional residual connections with more accurate and stable iterative optimization, enhancing model expressiveness without increasing parameter count. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves BLEU-4 scores of 22.96 and 19.34 on the PHOENIX-2014-T and CSL-Daily datasets, respectively, outperforming baseline models while using fewer decoder layers and iteration steps.