Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT) avoids costly gloss annotations but remains limited by weak visual-text alignment. Recent MLLM-based methods use frame descriptions as auxiliary supervision, yet these descriptions are often repetitive, producing nearly identical text features; meanwhile, global pooling washes out sparse but meaningful gestures. We propose FiMA (Fine-grained Multimodal Alignment), a pre-training framework for redundancy-aware description enhancement. FiMA combines a Description Enhancement Module, which removes shared template redundancy from description features, with a Multimodal Alignment Module, which aligns each text token to its most relevant visual frame through Max-Sim matching. On PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily, FiMA achieves state-of-the-art gloss-free SLT performance and visualizations show clearer feature separation and temporal grounding. The code will be released at https://github.com/Ryeliu/FiMA.

Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into lan- guage systems for tactile Commonsense Rea- soning, scaling such systems to realistic open- world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, pro- viding insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical common- sense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these proper- ties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tac- tile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspec- tives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 410 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data founda- tion for open-world generalization. We fur- ther introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open- world benchmark with more realistic and di- verse tasks. Then, we further introduce action- aware tactile modeling and a two-stage training paradigm to improve tactile representation effi- ciency and enable efficient reasoning. Experi- mental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state- of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be released.

Skeleton-aware sign language recognition (SLR) has gained popularity due to its ability to remain unaffected by background information and its lower computational requirements. Current methods utilize spatial graph modules and temporal modules to capture spatial and temporal features, respectively. However, their spatial graph modules are typically built on fixed graph structures such as graph convolutional networks or a single learnable graph, which only partially explore joint relationships. Additionally, a simple temporal convolution kernel is used to capture temporal information, which may not fully capture the complex movement patterns of different signers. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new spatial architecture consisting of two concurrent branches, which build input-sensitive joint relationships and incorporates specific domain knowledge for recognition, respectively. These two branches are followed by an aggregation process to distinguishe important joint connections. We then propose a new temporal module to model multi-scale temporal information to capture complex human dynamics. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared to previous skeleton-aware methods on four large-scale SLR benchmarks. Moreover, our method demonstrates superior accuracy compared to RGB-based methods in most cases while requiring much fewer computational resources, bringing better accuracy-computation trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/DSTA-SLR.