Ronglai Zuo (左镕来) Research Associate Huxley Building South Kensington Campus Imperial College London Email: r.zuo [at] imperial.ac.uk; zrl2016ustc [at] outlook.com [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn] [X]

Biography

I am currently a Research Associate at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Jiankang Deng and Prof. Stefanos Zafeiriou. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology under the supervision of Prof. Brian Mak in 2024. Before that, I received my B.Eng. degree from Special Class for the Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China, in 2020. I was a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia supervised by Fangyun Wei.

My research focuses on sign language processing (recognition/translation/generation), while I am also interested in generative models and multimodal learning.

News

[01/2026] One paper is accepted by ICRA 2026.

[12/2025] We will organize the 1st "Generative AI for Sign Language" workshop at CVPR 2026.

[06/2025] One paper is accepted by ICCV 2025.

[10/2024] Join Imperial College London as a Research Associate!

[09/2024] One paper is accepted by EMNLP 2024.

[08/2024] Successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis!

[07/2024] One paper is accepted by ECCV 2024.

[02/2024] One paper is accepted by COLING 2024.

[01/2024] One paper is accepted by ACM TOMM.

[02/2023] One paper is accepted by CVPR 2023.

[09/2022] One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2022.

[06/2022] One paper is accepted by Interspeech 2022.

[04/2022] Start my internship at MSRA!

[03/2022] One paper is accepted by CVPR 2022.

[12/2021] Pass my Ph.D. qualifying exam. Now I am a Ph.D. candidate!

[09/2020] Start my Ph.D. journey at HKUST!

[07/2020] Finish my undergraduate study at USTC. A memorable four-year journey in Hefei.

Publications

(*co-first authors)

• SignBot: Learning Human-to-Humanoid Sign Language Interaction
  Guanren Qiao, Sixu Lin, Ronglai Zuo, Zhizheng Wu, Kui Jia, and Guiliang Liu
  International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Vienna, Austria, 2026
  [pdf] [project]
• Signs as Tokens: A Retrieval-Enhanced Multilingual Sign Language Generator
  Ronglai Zuo, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, Evangelos Ververas, Jiankang Deng, and Stefanos Zafeiriou
  International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Honolulu, USA, 2025
  [pdf] [project]
• Towards Online Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation
  Ronglai Zuo, Fangyun Wei, and Brian Mak
  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Miami, USA, 2024
  [pdf] [code]
• A Simple Baseline for Spoken Language to Sign Language Translation with 3D Avatars
  Ronglai Zuo*, Fangyun Wei*, Zenggui Chen, Brian Mak, Jiaolong Yang, and Xin Tong
  European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Milan, Italy, 2024, Oral
  [pdf] [code]
• A Hong Kong Sign Language Corpus Collected from Sign-interpreted TV News
  Zhe Niu*, Ronglai Zuo*, Brian Mak, and Fangyun Wei
  Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (COLING), Turin, Italy, 2024, Oral
  [pdf] [dataset]
• Improving Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Consistency Constraints and Signer Removal
  Ronglai Zuo and Brian Mak
  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM), 2024
  [pdf] [code]
• Natural Language-Assisted Sign Language Recognition
  Ronglai Zuo, Fangyun Wei, and Brian Mak
  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vancouver, Canada, 2023
  [pdf] [code]
• Two-Stream Network for Sign Language Recognition and Translation
  Yutong Chen*, Ronglai Zuo*, Fangyun Wei*, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, and Brian Mak
  Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), New Orleans, USA, 2022, Spotlight
  [pdf] [code]
• C2SLR: Consistency-enhanced Continuous Sign Language Recognition
  Ronglai Zuo and Brian Mak
  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New Orleans, USA, 2022
  [pdf] [code]
• Local Context-aware Self-attention for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
  Ronglai Zuo and Brian Mak
  Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), Incheon, Korea, 2022
  [pdf] [code]

Invited Talks

• Generating Sign Language Motions via Language Modeling, British Machine Vision Association, 12/2025
• Advancements in Sign Language Generation: Shifts in Paradigm and Representation, USTC, 07/2025
• Vision-Based Sign Language Processing, DERI, Queen Mary University of London, 11/2024
• Vision-Based Sign Language Processing, iBUG Group, Imperial College London, 01/2024

Awards

• Stars of Tomorrow, Microsoft Research Asia, 2023
• Outstanding Graduate, USTC, 2020
• Outstanding Student, USTC, 2017-2019

Services

• Workshop Organizer: Generative AI for Sign Language (CVPR 2026)
• Conference Reviewer: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, ACCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI
• Journal Reviewer: IJCV, TIP, TMM, TCSVT, THMS, PR, IPM

Teaching

• Guest Lecturer in 70113 Generative AI, Imperial College London, Spring 2026
• TA in COMP2012 Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures, HKUST, Fall 2023
• TA in COMP2011 Programming with C++, HKUST, Spring & Fall 2021

© 2022-2026 Ronglai Zuo. Last updated in 01/2026.