  This paper presents an in-depth analysis of various self-supervision methods
for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR). We consider four recently
introduced transformer-based approaches to self-supervised learning from
videos, and four pre-training data regimes, and study all the combinations on
the WLASL2000 dataset. Our findings reveal that MaskFeat achieves performance
superior to pose-based and supervised video models, with a top-1 accuracy of
79.02% on gloss-based WLASL2000. Furthermore, we analyze these models' ability
to produce representations of ASL signs using linear probing on diverse
phonological features. This study underscores the value of architecture and
pre-training task choices in ISLR. Specifically, our results on WLASL2000
highlight the power of masked reconstruction pre-training, and our linear
probing results demonstrate the importance of hierarchical vision transformers
for sign language representation.
