arXiv Computation and Language

Exploring Multimodal Turn-Taking Cues in Face-to-Face Conversation using Voice Activity Projection

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 8

Multimodal Voice Activity Projection for Turn-Taking in Social Robots with Voice-Activity-Related Pretrained Encoders

Turn-taking prediction is a key requirement for social robots involved in human-human interaction, particularly in mediator settings, where the robot must anticipate conversational dynamics rather than merely react to pauses. This work presents a Multimodal Voice Activity Projection (MM-VAP) framework that extends the original audio-only VAP formulation to synchronized audio-visual inputs while preserving its self-supervised future-projection objective.

arXiv AI
Jul 9

Multimodal Voice Activity Projection for Turn-Taking in Social Robots with Voice-Activity-Related Pretrained Encoders

arXiv:2607. 07294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking prediction is a key requirement for social robots involved in human-human interaction, particularly in mediator settings, where the robot must anticipate conversational dynamics rather than merely react to pauses.

By Antonio Cano, Guillermo P\'erez, Luis Merino, Randy Gomez
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Audio-Visual Turn-taking Prediction in Cocktail Party Scenarios

The paper evaluates audio‑visual predictive turn‑taking models trained on clean data when applied to a noisy cocktail‑party scenario derived from the AVCocktail dataset. Results show a consistent performance drop—up to 38% relative in weighted F1—across both audio and visual modalities, with fine‑tuning improving robustness but varying by modality and pre‑training data size. The study highlights differing generalisation and adaptation abilities of audio versus visual inputs and underscores the need for robust modelling strategies in noisy human interactions.

By Long-Vu Hoang, Naomi Harte
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Predicting Turn-Taking Outcomes in Multi-Party Conversation: Interpretable Modelling of Speech and Gaze Dynamics with Interpersonal Closeness

The study investigates how gaze and speech cues, together with perceived interpersonal closeness, predict turn‑taking outcomes in free four‑person conversations. Using the GaMMA corpus, logistic regression models were trained on interpretable features such as gaze transition motifs, entropy, addressee identity, mutual gaze, and speaker loudness to classify floor‑transfer events as gaps or overlaps. Results show that gaze features alone capture predictive structure, and combining them with loudness yields a robust classifier (ROC AUC = 0.76 ± 0.04) that remains effective even under noisy conditions.

By Mark Dourado, Karim Haddad, Henrik G. Hassager, Stefania Serafin
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
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