Neural Video Compression Based on Deformable Temporal Alignment and Difference-aware Fusion

In conditional coding-based neural video compression, the quality of temporal context directly affects compression per- formance. Existing methods mostly construct context from prop- agated reference features, but they are vulnerable to motion esti- mation and local alignment errors in regions with complex mo- tion, occlusion, and high-frequency textures, resulting in inaccu- rate temporal information. To address this issue, this paper pro- poses a method combining deformable temporal alignment and difference-aware spatial selective fusion. A Context-aware Tem- poral Alignment Module is used to generate complementary tem- poral context, while a Difference-aware Spatial Selective Fusion module adaptively selects reliable temporal information and sup- presses misalignment. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves certain rate-distortion performance improve- ment over DCVC-DC.

SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting

Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) aims to recognize gloss sequences from unsegmented sign videos under weak sequence-level supervision. However, existing methods rely on sentence-level gloss annotations, providing limited temporal and semantic guidance for fine-grained representation learning. Conventional video-text alignment also requires large batch sizes, making it inefficient for memory-intensive sign language video training. In this work, we propose SMART, an MLLM-guided temporal alignment framework for joint sign recognition and spotting. SMART uses MLLMgenerated motion descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues and performs stable videotext alignment under small-batch training. To improve temporal representation learning, we introduce a Multi-Scale Temporal Adapter that models temporal interactions during transformer encoding. For dense temporal localization, SMART incorporates CSFormer, a CSLR-guided spotting module that injects recognition-derived gloss evidence into a boundary-aware spotting network. This unified framework enables CSLR features to benefit spotting, while spotting supervision complements weak CTC-based recognition. Experiments on four sign language benchmarks, including PHOENIX14-T, CSL-Daily, Large-scale KSL, and Disaster and Safety KSL datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of SMART across both recognition and spotting tasks.

Cross-Sign Language Transfer Learning Using Domain Adaptation with Multi-scale Temporal Alignment

Sign language serves as a vital means of communication for individuals with hearing impairments, yet recognition resources for the over 100 distinct sign languages are severely lacking. In response, we present our work on sign language recognition using transfer learning and the domain adaptation method TA3N, which utilizes the Temporal Relational Network (TRN) module for aligning multi-scale temporal relations. Our findings highlight the superior performance of Domain Adaptation to neural network-based transfer learning, particularly in improving recognition of American Sign Language (ASL). Our research also identifies the effectiveness of aligning shorter-term temporal features between source and target domains. In addition to using RGB, we conducted experiments using Optical Flow mode for the sign language samples, ultimately determining that RGB outperforms Optical Flow in the majority of cases. Our work aims to improve accessibility and communication for individuals who rely on sign language as their primary mode of communication.

Lag-aware cross-hand alignment for dual-hand action segmentation

Dual-hand action segmentation commonly fuses left- and right-hand representations at identical temporal indices, although coordinated hand transitions may occur with nonzero and time-varying delays. We introduce Lag-Aware Cross-Hand Alignment (LACA), a lightweight module that explicitly estimates directional temporal-offset distributions between hand-specific feature streams. LACA retrieves cross-hand information from the estimated offsets and incorporates a learned null state to suppress transfer when no compatible cross-hand transition is supported. Alignment is supervised using compatibility-aware targets derived automatically from frame-level training annotations, without requiring additional labels. Analysis of the HA-ViD and ATTACH training annotations reveals robust nonzero cross-hand matches for 44.7% and 48.9% of transition anchors, respectively, compared with 18.6% and 21.3% under temporally shifted controls. When integrated into Polyphony, LACA improves the two-hand mean F1@50 from 40.4 to 42.5 and boundary F1 from 56.5 to 59.6 on HA-ViD, and from 19.9 to 21.8 and 44.7 to 47.9, respectively, on ATTACH, relative to our reproduced Polyphony baseline. These gains require only approximately 0.0086 million additional trainable parameters. We further introduce LACA-C, a future-free variant that restricts alignment and the complete inference pipeline to current and past observations. On ATTACH, LACA-C achieves 83.6% transition-cue recall, a seed-averaged median availability delay of 233~ms, 0.72 false cues per minute, and segmentation-stage throughput of 224.9 current-position predictions per second. These results demonstrate that explicit cross-hand temporal alignment improves both action segmentation and boundary localization while supporting timely future-free perception.