Multi-Faceted Interactivity Alignment in Full-Duplex Speech Models

arXiv:2606.11167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full-duplex spoken dialogue models can listen and speak simultaneously, making them a promising architecture for natural conversation. However, current models are trained solely with supervised learning through token-level likelihood maximization, which does not directly optimize interaction-level behaviors, causing interactivity issues such as excessive silence and ill-timed turn-taking. Recent work has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to improve interactivity, but existing methods address only a limited set of interactive behaviors in their rewards. In this work, we propose a post-training alignment method that comprehensively improves the interactivity of full-duplex spoken dialogue models through RL. We address the four canonical axes of interactivity: pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption. For each axis, we extract short audio segments from human conversation corpora and optimize the model with axis-specific reward functions. An extra LLM-based reward for response quality prevents semantic degradation. We apply our method to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, demonstrating consistent improvements in interactivity on both offline evaluation with pre-recorded audio and real-time multi-turn dialogue evaluation.

Abstract:Full-duplex spoken dialogue models can listen and speak simultaneously, making them a promising architecture for natural conversation. However, current models are trained solely with supervised learning through token-level likelihood maximization, which does not directly optimize interaction-level behaviors, causing interactivity issues such as excessive silence and ill-timed turn-taking. Recent work has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to improve interactivity, but existing methods address only a limited set of interactive behaviors in their rewards. In this work, we propose a post-training alignment method that comprehensively improves the interactivity of full-duplex spoken dialogue models through RL. We address the four canonical axes of interactivity: pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption. For each axis, we extract short audio segments from human conversation corpora and optimize the model with axis-specific reward functions. An extra LLM-based reward for response quality prevents semantic degradation. We apply our method to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, demonstrating consistent improvements in interactivity on both offline evaluation with pre-recorded audio and real-time multi-turn dialogue evaluation.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2606.11167 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.11167v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11167 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Multi-Faceted Interactivity Alignment in Full-Duplex Speech Models

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