arXiv Computation and Language

Steering Follows Geometry, Not Labels: Emotion Directions in a Full-Duplex Speech Model

The paper investigates emotion steering in Moshi, a fully open‑source full‑duplex speech language model, across four emotions. Using mean‑difference activation steering—just a few vector additions per frame and no retraining—the authors find that emotion can be linearly decoded from Moshi’s residual stream, but steering is only partially achievable and uneven: happy, angry and surprise steer toward a shared direction while sad is distinctly steerable. They also demonstrate that the shared component across the three emotions cannot simply be projected away from all emotions equally.

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
Aug 27

Controllable Affective Generation via Latent Vector Steering

The paper introduces EmoVec, a lightweight framework that enables controllable affective generation in large language models by steering latent vectors. EmoVec identifies emotion-specific directions from paired neutral and emotion-conditioned responses using contrastive activation addition, then refines these directions through task-specific debiasing and principal subspace removal. During inference, the refined vectors are injected into the final residual stream with static or scenario-adaptive scaling, allowing continuous control over emotional intensity without updating model weights, and experiments across three LLMs and eight emotions demonstrate improved emotional salience while preserving semantic content, fluency, and coherence.

By Xixian Yong, Siyuan Chang, Yingying Zhang, Xian Wu, Xiao Zhou
arXiv AI
Aug 26

EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis

EmoTra‑TTS introduces a method for smooth intra‑utterance emotion transitions in speech synthesis. It uses a multi‑pass flow blending pipeline, dual‑stage VAD conditioning, and direction‑magnitude decoupled injection to generate frame‑aligned emotional prosody. The system adds only 0.43% more parameters, incurs no latency, and outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art baselines and two commercial systems in emotion transition quality and overall preference tests.

By Tianchi Liu, Zeyang Song, Tianrui Wang, Zhipeng Li, Chenglin Xu, Yiwen Guo