arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond Two Tracks: Speaker-Anchored Full-Duplex Dialogue Recovery

arXiv AI
Oct 16

Reference-Guided Turn-Taking Style Transfer for Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models

The paper introduces a method for controlling the turn‑taking behavior of full‑duplex spoken language models by identifying a single late‑layer residual‑stream direction, called the initiative vector, that determines how much the model speaks. By extracting this vector from the model’s own conversations without additional training, the authors can anticipate speech onsets up to 800 ms ahead and adjust the speech ratio from 6–12 % to 42–61 % through scaling during generation. A short reference recording of a target speaker allows the model to adopt that speaker’s turn‑taking style, and the transfer is highly speaker‑specific, with mismatched references degrading performance in 93–98 % of cases.

By Yuxuan Chen, Yang Xiao, Jack Sun, Chak Sun, Brick Li, Sam
arXiv AI
Oct 7

PERSIST: Who-What-When Memory Across Sessions for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue

PERSIST is a persistent memory system designed for multi-session, multi-speaker spoken dialogue, explicitly modeling Who, What, and When to enable voice assistants to recall past conversations and adapt to individual users. It structures cross-session histories into readable event records and retrieves them using a 3W joint scoring mechanism that combines semantic content, acoustic speaker identity, and temporal state. By reusing intermediate representations from the dialogue backbone, PERSIST reduces retrieval latency from 578.42 ms to 7.03 ms and achieves 85.08% end‑to‑end task accuracy on the SpokenTrace benchmark, improving EM@3 from 49.01% to 82.10%.

By Achira Lin, Siyuan Hou, Wenyi Yu, Xinnian Zhao, Haoyu Niu, Wang Geng, Longshuai Xiao, Shihai Xiao, Mangsuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Multi-Party Backchannel Prediction: a Diagnosis, a Benchmark, and a Ceiling

The paper introduces a multi‑party backchannel prediction benchmark built from the AMI meeting corpus, featuring 682 masked‑listener views, 190 speakers, and 18,697 backchannel events. A state‑of‑the‑art dyadic model performs at chance when applied zero‑shot to meetings, but its frozen acoustic features are still informative, and retraining improves performance to an AUROC of 0.751. The study reveals that listener conditioning helps only for listeners seen during training, that speaker identity is entangled with useful cues, and that backchannel rates vary significantly across individuals, prompting the authors to report both AUROC and event‑F1 metrics. whyItMatters":"The benchmark and evaluation tools provide a standardized, person‑disjoint testbed for advancing multi‑party backchannel prediction research."

By Mohammed Hafsati, Ahmed Loughzali
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
Jun 9

Liberating LLM Capabilities in Full-Duplex Speech Models

arXiv:2606. 07547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs.

By Luoyuan Zhang, Bokai Xu, Junbo Cui, Weiyue Sun, Yingjing Xu, Hanyu Liu, Yuan Yao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue

Motion-Omni is an end‑to‑end framework that jointly generates spoken dialogue and full‑body motion, producing speech, facial expressions, and hand, upper‑body, and lower‑body movements directly from the hidden states of a language model. The system requires joint training of the language model, speech generator, and motion generator to maintain audio‑motion alignment, and it is supervised using a scalable, model‑agnostic pipeline that pseudo‑labels 422,856 speech‑motion pairs. With a Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct backbone, Motion‑Omni‑Q7 achieves near‑cascade performance on motion metrics while being 5.4× faster, and it outperforms other non‑teacher cascades on beat correlation, diversity, and word error rate.

By Chengqian Ma, Wei Tao, Haoyu Zhang, Yiwen Guo