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

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

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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.

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