Conversational agents are increasingly embedded in human collaborative work, yet they remain fundamentally passive and reactive: they respond to explicit user requests rather than proactively recognizing moments when a team would benefit from timely intervention as human collaborators often do. This reactive design substantially limits the use of agents as active participants in multi-user collaboration, where disagreements, ambiguous goals, forgotten constraints, underspecified plans, discussion loops, and imbalanced participation can gradually undermine group progress.
arXiv:2606. 13544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations.
By Soumyajit Mitra, Prabhat Pandey, Abhinav Jain, Shanmukha Sahith, K V Vijay Girish
Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings.
arXiv:2610.20172v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Full-duplex speech systems must decide when to enter, hold, or relinquish the conversational floor, even as multiple speakers overlap or backchannel...
By Puneet Mathur, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2607. 17701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive agents are expected to anticipate user needs and provide autonomous assistance by perceiving environmental context without explicit instructions.
By Guanzhen Li, Liangming Pan, Leye Wang
arXiv:2607. 16610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon AI agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their interaction with users remains surprisingly thin.
By Chen Chen, Zhehuai Chen
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
By Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, JK Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla
Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.
The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
DuplexAgent-RSI is a full‑duplex voice‑agent collaboration system that coordinates continuous listening and speaking with asynchronous delegation to reasoning and coding agents. Its harness is modular, consisting of six editable components, and a closed‑loop improvement process (Duplex‑Harness‑RSI) revises these modules based on interaction traces and failure diagnostics. Experiments show that this approach yields stronger spoken‑knowledge and executable‑tool performance than comparable delegated systems while preserving robust interruption response.
By Yingda Shen, Yuxiang Wang, Kunyu Feng, Qinke Ni, Jiaqi Li, Minghao Hsu, Junan Zhang, Dekun Chen, Yutong Bian, Zhizheng Wu
arXiv:2609.24812v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Voice provides a natural and immediate interface for AI agents. Many settings in which voice agents could be useful, including meetings, households, an...
By Chenxu Xiong, Dongming Shen, Yuzhi Tang, Wentao Ma, Mu Li, Alex Smola
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