FD-VAD: Semantic Endpoint Detection for Streaming Full-Duplex Speech

arXiv:2609.35791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural turn-taking in full-duplex voice interaction requires determining from partial speech whether a pause reflects hesitation or a completed conversational intent. Acoustic voice activity detection lacks this semantic information, while cascaded ASR-based endpointing introduces transcription dependence and additional processing stages. We formulate semantic endpoint detection as a causal audio-language reasoning task and introduce FD-VAD, an ASR-free streaming endpointer that maps bounded causal audio windows directly to Continue/Stop decisions. FD-VAD combines a frozen speech encoder with a lightweight modality adapter and a parameter-efficiently adapted language model, using a last-chunk training objective for streaming inference. We further introduce confidence-gated endpoint commitment to control interruption versus delay and boundary-focused hard-negative sampling to improve decisions around ambiguous turn boundaries. Across in-domain and conversational evaluations, FD-VAD outperforms strong streaming and non-streaming semantic turn classifiers, and achieves the highest EOT recall among qualifying systems on TurnBench dev set $0.853$ (at FP<=0.10) in a zero-shot setting. These results show that semantic endpointing can be performed directly from streaming audio without intermediate ASR or dialogue state tracking.

Abstract:Natural turn-taking in full-duplex voice interaction requires determining from partial speech whether a pause reflects hesitation or a completed conversational intent. Acoustic voice activity detection lacks this semantic information, while cascaded ASR-based endpointing introduces transcription dependence and additional processing stages. We formulate semantic endpoint detection as a causal audio-language reasoning task and introduce FD-VAD, an ASR-free streaming endpointer that maps bounded causal audio windows directly to Continue/Stop decisions. FD-VAD combines a frozen speech encoder with a lightweight modality adapter and a parameter-efficiently adapted language model, using a last-chunk training objective for streaming inference. We further introduce confidence-gated endpoint commitment to control interruption versus delay and boundary-focused hard-negative sampling to improve decisions around ambiguous turn boundaries. Across in-domain and conversational evaluations, FD-VAD outperforms strong streaming and non-streaming semantic turn classifiers, and achieves the highest EOT recall among qualifying systems on TurnBench dev set $0.853$ (at FP<=0.10) in a zero-shot setting. These results show that semantic endpointing can be performed directly from streaming audio without intermediate ASR or dialogue state tracking.

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

arXiv:2609.35791 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.35791v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35791 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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FD-VAD: Semantic Endpoint Detection for Streaming Full-Duplex Speech

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