arXiv AI

Instruct-FD: Can Your Full-Duplex Speech System Follow Turn-Taking Instructions?

arXiv:2607. 20460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current full-duplex (FD) spoken dialogue systems can produce fluid interactions, yet it remains unclear whether they can adapt their turn-taking behavior when explicitly instructed.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

ECHO: A Matched-Contrast Benchmark for Context-Sensitive Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Dialogue

ECHO is a new paired diagnostic benchmark designed for Chinese full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems to evaluate context‑sensitive turn‑taking. It pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either a Yield or Keep decision, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. The benchmark introduces pair accuracy, penalizing constant‑action policies, and shows that many systems are biased toward Yield, performing better on interruptions than on backchannels.

By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Dawei Yang, Zhou Wang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
arXiv AI
Sep 4

DuplexSpeechBench-IFEval: Evaluating Implicit Instruction Following in Full-Duplex Voice Agents

DuplexSpeechBench-IFEval (DSB-IFEval) is a new benchmark that evaluates how full‑duplex voice agents follow implicit instructions during real‑time spoken interaction. It contains 1,038 test cases across eight assistant roles and tests five conditioning protocols, measuring floor management with an Instruction Adherence Score (IAS) and persona consistency with a Persona Adherence Score (PAS). Experiments on six speech systems reveal architecture‑dependent trade‑offs, showing that some models are more sensitive to explicit versus persona‑only instructions and that even when following conflicting directives, they struggle to override them under safety conflict.

By Puneet Mathur, Dinesh Manocha
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 Computation and Language
Oct 9

SteerablePlex: Can We Steer Full-Duplex Models?

The paper introduces SimIF-Bench, a benchmark that tests whether full‑duplex conversational models can stay within a prescribed scenario and complete multiple goals in order. It shows that current open‑source models struggle with these constraints. The authors then propose a GDPO‑based training recipe that allows a full‑duplex model, named SteerablePlex, to follow textual instructions during conversation while preserving turn‑taking, and demonstrate that it outperforms existing open‑source models and GPT‑Realtime when used as a controllable user simulator.

By Haolong Zheng, Maike Z\"ufle, Dominik Mach\'a\v{c}ek, Peter Pol\'ak, Xulin Fan, Xavier Sumba, Siyin Wang, Ond\v{r}ej Klejch, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
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 Computation and Language
Sep 25

Same Words, Different Actions: Paired Turn-Taking Evaluation under Rewritten Dialogue Contexts

The paper introduces ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for evaluating Chinese real‑time spoken dialogue systems on turn‑taking. ECHO pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either Yield or Keep actions, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. Experiments on four speech systems reveal that three systems over‑yield, correctly keeping the floor on fewer than 13% of backchannels, while the fourth system shows a more balanced performance, illustrating that interruption‑only evaluation can overestimate turn‑taking reliability.

By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Zhou Wang, Dawei Yang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
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
Sep 25

A Harness for Synthesizing Diverse Naturalistic Full-Duplex Conversations

The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.

By Matthew Sun, Vinay Kothapally, Meng Yu, Chao Huang, Hao Zhang, Yixuan Zhang, Steve Yves
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Decoupling Turn-Taking from Semantics: A Decoupled Data Approach for Finite-State-Machine-Based Full-Duplex Dialogue

The paper introduces a decoupled data approach for the Neural Finite State Machine (NFSM) framework to improve full‑duplex dialogue. It serializes real human‑human spoken dialogues into FSM tapes using a rule‑based event‑guided transformation, while shaping semantics through human‑agent text dialogues. A Source‑Aware Calibrated (SAC) loss is proposed to balance state‑transition token distribution and align each data source with its strongest supervisory signal, leading to better turn‑taking performance without sacrificing semantic quality.

By Yihang Li, Chenhui Chu