Comparison of Low Bitrate Quantizers for Encoding Swedish Sign Language
Klezovich, Anna 
| Mesch, Johanna | Henter, Gustav Eje | Beskow, Jonas
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion
- Venue:
- Palma, Mallorca, Spain
- Date:
- 16 May 2026
- Pages:
- 256–261
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Licence:
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- sign-lang ID:
- 26051
- ISBN:
- 978-2-493814-82-1
Abstract
This paper investigates the bitrate–distortion trade-off of different discrete representations for Swedish Sign Language (STS) using the STS Mocap v1 motion capture dataset. We compare the K-Means algorithm with the Residual Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (RQ-VAE) to determine how efficiently each method preserves salient motion information at low bitrates. The results show that RQ-VAE consistently achieves lower reconstruction error than K-Means at matching bitrates, particularly for body motion, and better preserves the signing space volume. We further demonstrate that quantized representations can serve as conditioning for a flow-matching generative model, producing plausible but still imperfect sign sequences at low bitrates. These findings highlight the advantages of vector quantized models for efficient sign language motion encoding.Document Download
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Citation in ACL Citation Format
Anna Klezovich, Johanna Mesch, Gustav Eje Henter, Jonas Beskow. 2026. Comparison of Low Bitrate Quantizers for Encoding Swedish Sign Language. In Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion, pages 256–261, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).BibTeX Export
@inproceedings{klezovich:26051:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Klezovich, Anna and Mesch, Johanna and Henter, Gustav Eje and Beskow, Jonas},
title = {Comparison of Low Bitrate Quantizers for Encoding {Swedish} {Sign} {Language}},
pages = {256--261},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2026} 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion},
maintitle = {15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2026)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Palma, Mallorca, Spain},
day = {16},
month = may,
year = {2026},
isbn = {978-2-493814-82-1},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/26051.html}
}