arXiv Computation and Language By Yuxiang Wang, Qinke Ni, Shengbo Cai, Wan Lin, Liqiang Zhang, Zhizheng Wu

ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Models

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ParaBridge is a self‑distillation method that uses a temporary paralinguistic instruction scaffold during training to teach a speech language model when non‑lexical cues should influence dialogue responses. By providing dense, full‑vocabulary next‑token targets from the scaffolded view while the scaffold‑free model generates its own replies, ParaBridge stabilizes inference‑time behavior without requiring curated dialogues or external reward models. Experiments on Qwen3‑Omni show significant gains on safety and empathy benchmarks while preserving general performance across multiple tests.

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