VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu
arXiv:2606. 00851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues.
By Sukru Samet Dindar, Riki Shimizu, Xilin Jiang, Nima Mesgarani
arXiv:2606. 24941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reviewing recorded interviews for affective cues such as composure and agitation is slow and subjective, and cloud services that could automate the task require sensitive audio to leave the device.
By Wai Laam Mak, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle, Pedro Machado
arXiv:2607. 14846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation.
By David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich, Rashish Tandon, Panagiotis Tzirakis
The paper introduces an incongruence score that quantifies disagreement between a speaker’s verbal content and vocal expression in a shared valence‑arousal‑dominance space, validated against human judgments. Using this metric, the authors evaluate three audio‑capable large language models across acted, conversational, and spontaneous speech datasets, finding that higher incongruence consistently increases error rates when audio is present. The study also shows that supervised classifiers behave oppositely, suggesting the challenge lies in how models fuse multimodal evidence rather than in the signal itself, and that the score remains predictive even without an emotion lexicon.
By Fengji Jing, Guy Laban
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:2610.06956v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large speech language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in unified cross-modal understanding and generation, yet paralinguistic cues, especi...
By Jianan Pan, Yiwen Gu, Xinze Li, Rui Wang, Kejie Huang
arXiv:2510.22588v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction tha...
By Wenming Tu, Guanrou Yang, Ruiqi Yan, Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Yipeng Kang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen, Zilong Zheng
arXiv:2609.05806v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify speakers' emotions in multi-turn dialogue. Accurate emotion recognition can support a wide...
By Amir Ben Khalifa, Fanny Bezancon, Amine Trabelsi, Bessam Abdulrazak
The paper introduces ACERT, a module that incorporates a flexible-length window of conversational context to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). By capturing emotional evolution across utterances, ACERT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on IEMOCAP, sets a new context‑aware benchmark on SAFE, and achieves strong results on MELD. Ablation studies attribute ACERT’s improvements to emotional and conversational continuity rather than speaker identity or acoustic conditions.
By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
The paper introduces an LLM-based framework for continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue, combining discrete emotion recognition with Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) assessment on the IEMOCAP dataset. It incorporates acoustic cues as natural language descriptions via the SpeechCueLLM approach and evaluates six models from the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families using zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA models outperform prompt-engineered GPT models, achieving a new state-of-the-art Valence CCC of 0.7822, and ablation studies show that textual audio descriptions significantly benefit smaller models.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that domain adaptation through fine-tuning can surpass larger GPT models in multimodal emotion evaluation, highlighting the importance of tailored training for emotion recognition tasks."
By Yutong Hu, Jinho Choi
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