arXiv AI
Oct 16

Reference-Guided Turn-Taking Style Transfer for Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models

The paper introduces a method for controlling the turn‑taking behavior of full‑duplex spoken language models by identifying a single late‑layer residual‑stream direction, called the initiative vector, that determines how much the model speaks. By extracting this vector from the model’s own conversations without additional training, the authors can anticipate speech onsets up to 800 ms ahead and adjust the speech ratio from 6–12 % to 42–61 % through scaling during generation. A short reference recording of a target speaker allows the model to adopt that speaker’s turn‑taking style, and the transfer is highly speaker‑specific, with mismatched references degrading performance in 93–98 % of cases.

By Yuxuan Chen, Yang Xiao, Jack Sun, Chak Sun, Brick Li, Sam
arXiv AI
Oct 7

PERSIST: Who-What-When Memory Across Sessions for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue

PERSIST is a persistent memory system designed for multi-session, multi-speaker spoken dialogue, explicitly modeling Who, What, and When to enable voice assistants to recall past conversations and adapt to individual users. It structures cross-session histories into readable event records and retrieves them using a 3W joint scoring mechanism that combines semantic content, acoustic speaker identity, and temporal state. By reusing intermediate representations from the dialogue backbone, PERSIST reduces retrieval latency from 578.42 ms to 7.03 ms and achieves 85.08% end‑to‑end task accuracy on the SpokenTrace benchmark, improving EM@3 from 49.01% to 82.10%.

By Achira Lin, Siyuan Hou, Wenyi Yu, Xinnian Zhao, Haoyu Niu, Wang Geng, Longshuai Xiao, Shihai Xiao, Mangsuo Zhao, Chao Zhang