BLEURT

Real-time sentence-level sign language translation system using SHuBERT-ByT5 with streaming hardware architecture

Researchers present a sentence-level sign language translation (SLT) system fine-tuned on How2Sign using QLoRA on a SHuBERT-ByT5 stack, achieving BLEU 15.9 and BLEURT 44.7 on the test split. The primary contribution is a hardware-aware streaming architecture that distributes camera capture to a Raspberry Pi 4B client while offloading perception and translation to a CPU/GPU backend. Latency optimizations including chunked ingestion, parallelized perception, and a sentence-boundary state machine reduce mean post-finalization response latency by 27.7% to 1.354 seconds. The system is designed for real-time deployment across diverse client devices rather than proposing a novel translation architecture.