用微分方程思想改进手语翻译解码器更新机制,不增参数却提性能。
ODE-Based Transformer Decoders for Iterative Sign Language Translation

- 从常微分方程视角重构解码器迭代更新,引入龙格-库塔方法提升精度。
- 在PHOENIX-2014-T上达22.96 BLEU-4,CSL-Daily上达19.34 BLEU-4。
- 适合追求高效推理、资源受限场景下的手语翻译系统设计者。
手语翻译已通过Transformer架构取得显著进展,但近期提升主要依赖扩大模型规模,带来计算开销增加。本文提出一种参数高效替代方案,通过增强迭代精炼解码器的更新动态来提升表达能力,而不增加模型大小。将残差精炼更新重新诠释为常微分方程(ODE)形式,采用更高阶数值积分方法——龙格-库塔法(RK-2 和 RK-4),在每步更新中执行多次函数评估,实现更精确稳定的表示更新,且无需额外参数。据我们所知,这是首个将ODE启发式更新机制应用于手语翻译的研究。实验显示,RK-2在PHOENIX-2014-T测试集上达到22.96 BLEU-4,CSL-Daily上达19.34 BLEU-4,优于IPSLT基线,在更少解码层和迭代次数下实现更好表现。结果表明,更强的精炼动态可在参数效率约束下提升翻译性能,为传统模型扩增提供互补路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Sign language translation has achieved strong results with Transformer architectures, yet recent improvements largely rely on scaling model capacity at the cost of increased computation. We propose a parameter-efficient alternative that improves expressiveness without increasing model size. Rather than scaling capacity, we focus on enhancing the update dynamics of iterative refinement decoders, where each refinement step corresponds to one internal decoder iteration that progressively improves the latent representation before translation generation. We reinterpret residual refinement updates from an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) perspective and replace them with higher-order numerical integration schemes, namely Runge--Kutta methods (RK-2 and RK-4). These methods perform multiple function evaluations within each refinement step to produce more accurate and stable representation updates without adding decoder parameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of ODE-inspired update dynamics to sign language translation. RK-2 achieves 22.96 BLEU-4 on the PHOENIX-2014-T test set and 19.34 BLEU-4 on the CSL-Daily test set, outperforming the IPSLT baseline on both benchmarks, with fewer decoder layers and refinement iterations on CSL-Daily. These results suggest that stronger refinement dynamics can improve translation performance under parameter-efficient decoder designs, providing a complementary alternative to conventional model scaling.
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