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 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
Sep 28

Learning Natural Conversational Behavior in Tandem Speech-to-Speech Models with Randomized Guidance

The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.

By Manato Yaguchi, Yotaro Kubo, Hikaru Asano, So Kuroki