arXiv Computation and Language

Model vs. User: Whose Values Prevail? Inference-Time Value Alignment in Multi-Turn Conversations

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

DuplexGen: Adaptive Synthesis of Human-AI Turn-Taking Dialogues

arXiv:2607.26178v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Turn-taking is a central component of full-duplex interaction. Which turn-taking behaviors are appropriate varies with the scenario, yet current mo...

By Takyoung Kim, Kang-wook Kim, Sang Hoon Woo, Julia Hirschberg, Gunhee Kim, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

arXiv:2608. 13482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical.

By Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal, Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Yiderigun Borjigin, Kartik Bali, Stefan Krsteski, Harsh Raj, Huu Nguyen, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West
arXiv AI
Aug 25

An Empirical Study on Preference Tuning Generalization and Diversity Under Domain Shift

The paper investigates how preference tuning—optimizing language models with explicit preference signals—behaves when applied to new domains. It systematically compares five alignment objectives and several adaptation strategies, such as target‑domain supervised fine‑tuning and pseudo‑labeling, across summarization, question‑answering helpfulness, and safety tasks. Results show that while pseudo‑labeling reduces domain‑shift degradation, it also causes mode collapse, highlighting a trade‑off between generalization and diversity.

By Constantinos Karouzos, Xingwei Tan, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

TurnBench: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Turn-Taking Dynamics in Spoken Dialogue

TurnBench is a new multi‑domain benchmark for evaluating turn‑taking dynamics in spoken dialogue. It comprises a 30‑hour hand‑labeled corpus of dyadic human conversations, a standardized evaluation protocol for end‑of‑turn and interruption detection, and covers six distinct interaction styles with triple annotation. The benchmark also provides a 104‑hour training set, a public leaderboard, and an interactive dataset viewer at https://turnbench.sesame.com.

By Freeman Jiang, Ramon Sanabria, Soham Deshmukh, Bandhav Veluri, Simon Michael Vuch Williams, Elliott K. Suen, Garreth Lee, Kevin Yoonho Choi, Takuya Umeki, Riku Kubo, Sathvik Udupa, Chien-yu Huang, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Zhuoyan Tao, Satyapriya Krishna, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Yu Tsao, Hung-yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe
arXiv AI
Sep 30

PADM\'E: Preference Alignment Data Synthesis for Meta-Evaluation of LM Agent Evaluators

PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.

By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.

By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury