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Aug 4

OmniInteract: Benchmarking Real-World Streaming Interaction for Real-Time Omnimodal Assistants

We introduce OmniInteract, a streaming benchmark for real-time omnimodal large language models evaluated through native online inference over audio-visual streams. Unlike offline video understanding or text-prompted streaming QA, OmniInteract preserves the original audio-visual stream and requires models to process it online, without access to future content. User queries and ambient sounds are embedded in the audio track, requiring models to detect multimodal triggers, decide when to respond, and answer while the stream unfolds. OmniInteract contains 250 videos with 1,430 temporally grounded response slots: 1,062 1Q1A slots across real-time, proactive, and nested scenarios, and 368 1QnA slots for continuous task monitoring and step guidance. Each slot includes a trigger, response window, and target answer. We evaluate response correctness, timing, invalid outputs, interruption handling, and context continuity using Interaction-Aware Quality-Timeliness F1, Interruption Diagnostic Suite, and Nested Chain Completion Score. Experiments show that current models remain weak in streaming interaction, with the best overall IA-QTF1 reaching only 0.368 and the best 1QnA IA-QTF1 only 0.052. Further study on mathematical reasoning in full-duplex settings shows that offline capability does not necessarily transfer to online interaction. Code and datasets will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/OmniInteract.

  • 11 authors
·
May 25 2

OmniFlatten: An End-to-end GPT Model for Seamless Voice Conversation

Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems significantly advance over traditional turn-based dialogue systems, as they allow simultaneous bidirectional communication, closely mirroring human-human interactions. However, achieving low latency and natural interactions in full-duplex dialogue systems remains a significant challenge, especially considering human conversation dynamics such as interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. In this paper, we introduce a novel End-to-End GPT-based model OmniFlatten for full-duplex conversation, capable of effectively modeling the complex behaviors inherent to natural conversations with low latency. To achieve full-duplex communication capabilities, we propose a multi-stage post-training scheme that progressively adapts a text-based large language model (LLM) backbone into a speech-text dialogue LLM, capable of generating text and speech in real time, without modifying the architecture of the backbone LLM. The training process comprises three stages: modality alignment, half-duplex dialogue learning, and full-duplex dialogue learning. Throughout all training stages, we standardize the data using a flattening operation, which allows us to unify the training methods and the model architecture across different modalities and tasks. Our approach offers a straightforward modeling technique and a promising research direction for developing efficient and natural end-to-end full-duplex spoken dialogue systems. Audio samples of dialogues generated by OmniFlatten can be found at this web site (https://omniflatten.github.io/).

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024 1

UAF: A Unified Audio Front-end LLM for Full-Duplex Speech Interaction

Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from critical limitations, including accumulated latency, information loss, and error propagation across modules. To address these issues, recent efforts focus on the end-to-end audio large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o, which primarily unify speech understanding and generation task. However, most of these models are inherently half-duplex, and rely on a suite of separate, task-specific front-end components, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and turn-taking detection (TD). In our development of speech assistant, we observed that optimizing the speech front-end is equally crucial as advancing the back-end unified model for achieving seamless, responsive interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose the first unified audio front-end LLM (UAF) tailored for full-duplex speech systems. Our model reformulates diverse audio front-end tasks into a single auto-regressive sequence prediction problem, including VAD, TD, speaker recognition (SR), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answer (QA). It takes streaming fixed-duration audio chunk (e.g., 600 ms) as input, leverages a reference audio prompt to anchor the target speaker at the beginning, and regressively generates discrete tokens encoding both semantic content and system-level state controls (e.g., interruption signals). Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across multiple audio front-end tasks and significantly enhances response latency and interruption accuracy in real-world interaction scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 29

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations

Full-duplex voice interaction allows users and agents to speak simultaneously with controllable barge-in, enabling lifelike assistants and customer service. Existing solutions are either end-to-end, difficult to design and hard to control, or modular pipelines governed by turn-taking controllers that ease upgrades and per-module optimization; however, prior modular frameworks depend on non-open components and external providers, limiting holistic optimization. In this work, we present a complete, practical full-duplex voice interaction system comprising a turn-taking controller, an interaction module, and a dialogue manager. The controller integrates streaming personalized VAD (pVAD) to suppress false barge-ins from noise and non-primary speakers, precisely timestamp primary-speaker segments, and explicitly enable primary-speaker barge-ins; a semantic end-of-turn detector improves stop decisions. It upgrades heterogeneous half-duplex pipelines, cascaded, semi-cascaded, and speech-to-speech, to full duplex. Using internal models, we implement cascaded and semi-cascaded variants; the semi-cascaded one captures emotional and paralinguistic cues, yields more coherent responses, lowers latency and error propagation, and improves robustness. A dialogue manager extends capabilities via tool invocation and context management. We also propose three system-level metrics, barge-in, end-of-turn detection accuracy, and end-to-end latency, to assess naturalness, control accuracy, and efficiency. Experiments show fewer false interruptions, more accurate semantic ends, and lower latency approaching industrial systems, enabling robust, natural, real-time full-duplex interaction. Demos: https://fireredteam.github.io/demos/firered_chat.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025

Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs

Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs.

  • 13 authors
·
Jul 6

Liberating LLM Capabilities in Full-Duplex Speech Models

Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs. Existing work improves spoken reasoning or full-duplex turn-taking, but still treats text as a hidden intermediate state or a subordinate modality rather than a first-class output channel. We propose Listen-Write-Speak (LWS), a text-first tri-channel paradigm in which a single autoregressive LLM continuously listens to user audio, writes visible free-form text as its primary output, and speaks a realtime oral response in parallel under a shared causal attention context. This behavior is implemented entirely through a Token Schema, requiring no architectural modifications, and learned via a two-stage data pipeline that synthesizes per-second cognitive annotations consistent with the revealed input timeline. Empirically, LWS demonstrates strong full-duplex interaction on Full-Duplex-Bench, reaches 4.72 on VoiceBench AlpacaEval, achieves 92.6% writing-speaking consistency, and consistently outperforms its internal ablations on URO-Bench. These results suggest that visible writing can serve as a first-class output channel for speech interaction without sacrificing realtime responsiveness. The code and dataset are available on the project page: https://royalzhang.com/project/lws-page/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 3 2

Beyond Turn-Based Interfaces: Synchronous LLMs as Full-Duplex Dialogue Agents

Despite broad interest in modeling spoken dialogue agents, most approaches are inherently "half-duplex" -- restricted to turn-based interaction with responses requiring explicit prompting by the user or implicit tracking of interruption or silence events. Human dialogue, by contrast, is "full-duplex" allowing for rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling. Technically, the challenge of achieving full-duplex dialogue with LLMs lies in modeling synchrony as pre-trained LLMs do not have a sense of "time". To bridge this gap, we propose Synchronous LLMs for full-duplex spoken dialogue modeling. We design a novel mechanism to integrate time information into Llama3-8b so that they run synchronously with the real-world clock. We also introduce a training recipe that uses 212k hours of synthetic spoken dialogue data generated from text dialogue data to create a model that generates meaningful and natural spoken dialogue, with just 2k hours of real-world spoken dialogue data. Synchronous LLMs outperform state-of-the-art in dialogue meaningfulness while maintaining naturalness. Finally, we demonstrate the model's ability to participate in full-duplex dialogue by simulating interaction between two agents trained on different datasets, while considering Internet-scale latencies of up to 240 ms. Webpage: https://syncllm.cs.washington.edu/.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models have shifted from turn-based to full-duplex designs, where the model continuously listens to the user while generating responses. However, existing duplex backbones still lack a native channel for in-conversation planning and tool calling, leaving real-time agentic behaviour either tied to turn boundaries or relegated to an external cascade. We propose DuplexSLA, a native full-duplex Speech-Language-Action foundation model that decodes assistant audio together with a structured action stream on a shared 160 ms chunk timeline. DuplexSLA is built on a dual-stream three-channel formulation: a continuous user audio channel, a discrete assistant audio channel, and a rate-limited textual action channel, all decoded jointly by a single backbone, so that listening, speaking, planning, and tool calling unfold on one shared clock. Two capabilities define the model: (1) semantic-driven turn-taking control, where interruption, pause, and backchannel are handled inside the same backbone instead of by an external semantic VAD; and (2) in-conversation planning and tool calling, where planning text and structured tool calls are emitted on the action channel without halting assistant audio, so that multi-action and backchannel-triggered tool use are interleaved with ongoing speech. To evaluate these capabilities together, we further construct DuplexSLA-Bench, a duplex benchmark covering pause, interrupt, and backchannel turn-taking together with three styles of in-conversation tool calling. Our project page, interactive demos, and the DuplexSLA-Bench evaluation suite are publicly available at https://github.com/hyzhang24/DuplexSLA.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 10

Fun-Audio-Chat Technical Report

Recent advancements in joint speech-text models show great potential for seamless voice interactions. However, existing models face critical challenges: temporal resolution mismatch between speech tokens (25Hz) and text tokens (~3Hz) dilutes semantic information, incurs high computational costs, and causes catastrophic forgetting of text LLM knowledge. We introduce Fun-Audio-Chat, a Large Audio Language Model addressing these limitations via two innovations from our previous work DrVoice. First, Dual-Resolution Speech Representations (DRSR): the Shared LLM processes audio at efficient 5Hz (via token grouping), while the Speech Refined Head generates high-quality tokens at 25Hz, balancing efficiency (~50% GPU reduction) and quality. Second, Core-Cocktail Training, a two-stage fine-tuning with intermediate merging that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. We then apply Multi-Task DPO Training to enhance robustness, audio understanding, instruction-following and voice empathy. This multi-stage post-training enables Fun-Audio-Chat to retain text LLM knowledge while gaining powerful audio understanding, reasoning, and generation. Unlike recent LALMs requiring large-scale audio-text pre-training, Fun-Audio-Chat leverages pre-trained models and extensive post-training. Fun-Audio-Chat 8B and MoE 30B-A3B achieve competitive performance on Speech-to-Text and Speech-to-Speech tasks, ranking top among similar-scale models on Spoken QA benchmarks. They also achieve competitive to superior performance on Audio Understanding, Speech Function Calling, Instruction-Following and Voice Empathy. We develop Fun-Audio-Chat-Duplex, a full-duplex variant with strong performance on Spoken QA and full-duplex interactions. We open-source Fun-Audio-Chat-8B with training and inference code, and provide an interactive demo.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 23, 2025

TurnGuide: Enhancing Meaningful Full Duplex Spoken Interactions via Dynamic Turn-Level Text-Speech Interleaving

Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (FD-SLMs) are specialized foundation models designed to enable natural, real-time spoken interactions by modeling complex conversational turn-taking such as interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. End-to-end (e2e) FD-SLMs leverage real-world double-channel conversational data to capture nuanced two-speaker dialogue patterns for human-like interactions, but their conversational abilities often degrade compared to pure-text conversation due to prolonged speech sequences and limited high-quality spoken dialogue data. Although interleaved text-speech generation could mitigate this degradation, integrating discrete text tokens into continuous double-channel audio streams could disrupt the precise time alignment required for fluid interaction. To address this, we propose TurnGuide, a novel text-speech interleaved generation approach for e2e FD-SLMs that dynamically segments assistant speech into dialogue turns and interleaves turn-level text and speech generation. This approach allows FD-SLMs to integrate the semantic intelligence of LLMs without compromising the natural acoustic flow. Extensive experiments show that TurnGuide not only significantly improves e2e FD-SLMs to produce semantically meaningful, coherent speech but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on various turn-taking events. Demos are available at https://dreamtheater123.github.io/TurnGuide-Demo/. Code will be available at https://github.com/dreamtheater123/TurnGuide.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 19

End-to-End Complex-Valued Multidilated Convolutional Neural Network for Joint Acoustic Echo Cancellation and Noise Suppression

Echo and noise suppression is an integral part of a full-duplex communication system. Many recent acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) systems rely on a separate adaptive filtering module for linear echo suppression and a neural module for residual echo suppression. However, not only do adaptive filtering modules require convergence and remain susceptible to changes in acoustic environments, but this two-stage framework also often introduces unnecessary delays to the AEC system when neural modules are already capable of both linear and nonlinear echo suppression. In this paper, we exploit the offset-compensating ability of complex time-frequency masks and propose an end-to-end complex-valued neural network architecture. The building block of the proposed model is a pseudocomplex extension based on the densely-connected multidilated DenseNet (D3Net) building block, resulting in a very small network of only 354K parameters. The architecture utilized the multi-resolution nature of the D3Net building blocks to eliminate the need for pooling, allowing the network to extract features using large receptive fields without any loss of output resolution. We also propose a dual-mask technique for joint echo and noise suppression with simultaneous speech enhancement. Evaluation on both synthetic and real test sets demonstrated promising results across multiple energy-based metrics and perceptual proxies.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2021

Metronome: Bound the Cache, Keep the Beat for Real-Time Interaction Model Serving

Real-time interaction models -- Moshi, MiniCPM-o, Qwen-Omni -- turn serving into a periodic real-time task: on every frame a session ingests streaming audio and must respond by a recurring wall-clock deadline, while its KV cache grows monotonically and stays pinned for the whole conversation. This regime hides a dangerous failure mode. On a real full-duplex stack, sustained load does not degrade serving gracefully: it falls off a cliff, jumping in one step from milliseconds per frame to a stalled engine when accumulated session state exhausts the KV pool. The collapse is metastable -- identical five-minute runs collapse or survive on run-to-run variance -- and silent: latency and deadline-miss metrics read healthy throughout. We show one move restores both stability and observability: bound each session's resident state, and latency starts telling the truth. Metronome's in-engine KV window eliminates the collapse (0/20 vs. 14/20 runs across two batches) and turns per-frame latency into a monotone load signal, on which an online admission controller discovers the schedulable concurrency; without the window, the identical controller over-admits into the wall. A first-order model predicts the collapse time within a few percent on the headline model, and a quality probe validates the bound's design by ablation: the window alone is quality-free in turn-based decoding, and its few pinned attention-sink tokens are what keep free-running generation healthy. Everything is measured end-to-end on real audio, across four interaction models on one GPU.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 1

Prefill-as-a-Service: KVCache of Next-Generation Models Could Go Cross-Datacenter

Prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation has become the standard architecture for large-scale LLM serving, but in practice its deployment boundary is still determined by KVCache transfer. In conventional dense-attention models, prefill generates huge KVCache traffics that keep prefill and decode tightly coupled within a single high-bandwidth network domain, limiting heterogeneous deployment and resource elasticity. Recent hybrid-attention architectures substantially reduce KVCache size, making cross-cluster KVCache transport increasingly plausible. However, smaller KVCache alone does not make heterogeneous cross-datacenter PD serving practical: real workloads remain bursty, request lengths are highly skewed, prefix caches are unevenly distributed, and inter-cluster bandwidth fluctuates. A naive design that fully externalizes prefill can therefore still suffer from congestion, unstable queueing, and poor utilization. We present Prefill-as-a-Service (PrfaaS), a cross-datacenter serving architecture that selectively offloads long-context prefill to standalone, compute-dense prefill clusters and transfers the resulting KVCache over commodity Ethernet to local PD clusters for decode. Rather than treating reduced KVCache as sufficient, PrfaaS combines model-side KV efficiency with system-side selective offloading, bandwidth-aware scheduling, and cache-aware request placement. This design removes the requirement that heterogeneous accelerators share the same low-latency RDMA fabric, enabling independent scaling of prefill and decode capacity across loosely coupled clusters. In a case study using an internal 1T-parameter hybrid model, a PrfaaS-augmented heterogeneous deployment achieves 54% higher serving throughput and 64% lower P90 TTFT than a homogeneous PD baseline, with approximately 15% throughput gain at equal cost, while consuming only modest cross-datacenter bandwidth.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 21

P/D-Serve: Serving Disaggregated Large Language Model at Scale

Serving disaggregated large language models (LLMs) over tens of thousands of xPU devices (GPUs or NPUs) with reliable performance faces multiple challenges. 1) Ignoring the diversity (various prefixes and tidal requests), treating all the prompts in a mixed pool is inadequate. To facilitate the similarity per scenario and minimize the inner mismatch on P/D (prefill and decoding) processing, fine-grained organization is required, dynamically adjusting P/D ratios for better performance. 2) Due to inaccurate estimation on workload (queue status or maintained connections), the global scheduler easily incurs unnecessary timeouts in prefill. 3) Block-fixed device-to-device (D2D) KVCache transfer over cluster-level RDMA (remote direct memory access) fails to achieve desired D2D utilization as expected. To overcome previous problems, this paper proposes an end-to-end system P/D-Serve, complying with the paradigm of MLOps (machine learning operations), which models end-to-end (E2E) P/D performance and enables: 1) fine-grained P/D organization, mapping the service with RoCE (RDMA over converged ethernet) as needed, to facilitate similar processing and dynamic adjustments on P/D ratios; 2) on-demand forwarding upon rejections for idle prefill, decoupling the scheduler from regular inaccurate reports and local queues, to avoid timeouts in prefill; and 3) efficient KVCache transfer via optimized D2D access. P/D-Serve is implemented upon Ascend and MindSpore, has been deployed over tens of thousands of NPUs for more than eight months in commercial use, and further achieves 60\%, 42\% and 46\% improvements on E2E throughput, time-to-first-token (TTFT) SLO (service level objective) and D2D transfer time. As the E2E system with optimizations, P/D-Serve achieves 6.7x increase on throughput, compared with aggregated LLMs.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024

Hybrid Digital and Analog Beamforming Design for Large-Scale Antenna Arrays

The potential of using of millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency for future wireless cellular communication systems has motivated the study of large-scale antenna arrays for achieving highly directional beamforming. However, the conventional fully digital beamforming methods which require one radio frequency (RF) chain per antenna element is not viable for large-scale antenna arrays due to the high cost and high power consumption of RF chain components in high frequencies. To address the challenge of this hardware limitation, this paper considers a hybrid beamforming architecture in which the overall beamformer consists of a low-dimensional digital beamformer followed by an RF beamformer implemented using analog phase shifters. Our aim is to show that such an architecture can approach the performance of a fully digital scheme with much fewer number of RF chains. Specifically, this paper establishes that if the number of RF chains is twice the total number of data streams, the hybrid beamforming structure can realize any fully digital beamformer exactly, regardless of the number of antenna elements. For cases with fewer number of RF chains, this paper further considers the hybrid beamforming design problem for both the transmission scenario of a point-to-point multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) system and a downlink multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) system. For each scenario, we propose a heuristic hybrid beamforming design that achieves a performance close to the performance of the fully digital beamforming baseline. Finally, the proposed algorithms are modified for the more practical setting in which only finite resolution phase shifters are available. Numerical simulations show that the proposed schemes are effective even when phase shifters with very low resolution are used.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 25, 2016 1

SALMONN-omni: A Codec-free LLM for Full-duplex Speech Understanding and Generation

Full-duplex multimodal large language models (LLMs) provide a unified framework for addressing diverse speech understanding and generation tasks, enabling more natural and seamless human-machine conversations. Unlike traditional modularised conversational AI systems, which separate speech recognition, understanding, and text-to-speech generation into distinct components, multimodal LLMs operate as single end-to-end models. This streamlined design eliminates error propagation across components and fully leverages the rich non-verbal information embedded in input speech signals. We introduce SALMONN-omni, a codec-free, full-duplex speech understanding and generation model capable of simultaneously listening to its own generated speech and background sounds while speaking. To support this capability, we propose a novel duplex spoken dialogue framework incorporating a ``thinking'' mechanism that facilitates asynchronous text and speech generation relying on embeddings instead of codecs (quantized speech and audio tokens). Experimental results demonstrate SALMONN-omni's versatility across a broad range of streaming speech tasks, including speech recognition, speech enhancement, and spoken question answering. Additionally, SALMONN-omni excels at managing turn-taking, barge-in, and echo cancellation scenarios, establishing its potential as a robust prototype for full-duplex conversational AI systems. To the best of our knowledge, SALMONN-omni is the first codec-free model of its kind. A full technical report along with model checkpoints will be released soon.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

Stochastic Controlled Averaging for Federated Learning with Communication Compression

Communication compression, a technique aiming to reduce the information volume to be transmitted over the air, has gained great interests in Federated Learning (FL) for the potential of alleviating its communication overhead. However, communication compression brings forth new challenges in FL due to the interplay of compression-incurred information distortion and inherent characteristics of FL such as partial participation and data heterogeneity. Despite the recent development, the performance of compressed FL approaches has not been fully exploited. The existing approaches either cannot accommodate arbitrary data heterogeneity or partial participation, or require stringent conditions on compression. In this paper, we revisit the seminal stochastic controlled averaging method by proposing an equivalent but more efficient/simplified formulation with halved uplink communication costs. Building upon this implementation, we propose two compressed FL algorithms, SCALLION and SCAFCOM, to support unbiased and biased compression, respectively. Both the proposed methods outperform the existing compressed FL methods in terms of communication and computation complexities. Moreover, SCALLION and SCAFCOM accommodates arbitrary data heterogeneity and do not make any additional assumptions on compression errors. Experiments show that SCALLION and SCAFCOM can match the performance of corresponding full-precision FL approaches with substantially reduced uplink communication, and outperform recent compressed FL methods under the same communication budget.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 16, 2023