arXiv Computation and Language

Loud and Clear: Dynamic Activation Steering for Improving Speech Intelligibility in Noisy Environments

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models

SteerDuplex is a full‑duplex speech dialogue model that can be steered along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. The authors introduce a taxonomy of text‑ and audio‑based steerability, identify gaps in existing models, and fine‑tune a Moshi‑based model with reinforcement learning to improve timing and response continuity. They also present SteerBench, a benchmark of 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human‑authored rubrics, showing significant gains in audio‑steering pass rates and interruption handling compared to open baselines.

By Utkarsh Tyagi, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Advait Gosai, Sonal Kumar, Nikhil Barhate, Isabell Sagar, Steven Li, Miheer Bavare, Daniel Quigley, Fabiola Tapia Carrillo, Jose M Patron E, Diego Mac\'ias Guti\'errez, Paul Song, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Yunzhong He
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Noise Adaptive Streaming Audio-Visual Speech Token Enhancement for Robust Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models

The paper introduces AV-STE, a modular streaming audio‑visual front‑end that enhances corrupted semantic speech tokens using noisy audio and lip video before they reach a frozen speech LLM. By preserving the downstream dialogue model’s pretrained conversational abilities, AV‑STE improves response coherence from 1.42 to 1.91 in same‑dataset speaker interference scenarios while maintaining turn‑taking behavior. These gains also transfer to out‑of‑domain Seamless Interaction.

By Bella Godiva, Yeonju Kim, Yong Man Ro