Yangzhuo Li
2026
Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model Toward Semantic and Turn-taking Robustness in Interactive Spoken Dialogue Models
Yifu Chen | Shengpeng Ji | Zhengqing Liu | Qian Chen | Wen Wang | Ziqing Wang | Yangzhuo Li | Tianle Liang | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yifu Chen | Shengpeng Ji | Zhengqing Liu | Qian Chen | Wen Wang | Ziqing Wang | Yangzhuo Li | Tianle Liang | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Achieving seamless, human-like interaction remains a key challenge for full-duplex spoken dialogue models (SDMs). Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially enhanced text- and vision-language models, while well-designed reward signals are crucial for the performance of RL. We consider RL a promising strategy to address the key challenge for SDMs. However, a fundamental barrier persists: prevailing automated metrics for assessing interaction quality rely on superficial proxies, such as behavioral statistics or timing-prediction accuracy, failing to provide reliable reward signals for RL. On the other hand, human evaluations, despite their richness, remain costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. We tackle this critical barrier by proposing a Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model, which is trained to understand complex interaction dynamics using a detailed taxonomy and an annotated dataset, produces a single score and, crucially, provides separate evaluations for semantic quality and interaction timing. Such dual outputs furnish precise diagnostic feedback for SDMs and deliver a dependable, instructive reward signal suitable for online reinforcement learning. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on interaction-quality assessment across a wide spectrum of datasets, spanning synthetic dialogues and complex real-world interactions.
VoxMind: An End-to-End Agentic Spoken Dialogue System
Tianle Liang | Yifu Chen | Shengpeng Ji | Yijun Chen | Zhiyang Jia | Jingyu Lu | Fan Zhuo | Xueyi Pu | Yangzhuo Li | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianle Liang | Yifu Chen | Shengpeng Ji | Yijun Chen | Zhiyang Jia | Jingyu Lu | Fan Zhuo | Xueyi Pu | Yangzhuo Li | Zhou Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent end-to-end spoken dialogue models enable natural interaction. However, as user demands become increasingly complex, models that rely solely on conversational abilities often struggle to cope. Incorporating agentic capabilities is therefore essential: by enabling tool use, these models can extend their knowledge boundaries and better solve real-world tasks. Yet, existing research has largely concentrated on core perception and generation, with comparatively limited exploration of such tool-augmented extensions. To bridge this gap, we present VoxMind, an integrated framework designed to equip end-to-end spoken dialogue models with comprehensive agentic abilities. Leveraging our curated 470-hour AgentChat dataset, we incorporate a "Think-before-Speak" mechanism, enabling the model to internalize structured reasoning as a critical prerequisite for planning and response generation. Furthermore, to mitigate latency bottlenecks caused by large-scale tool integration, we propose a Multi-Agent Dynamic Tool Management architecture. By asynchronously delegating retrieval tasks to an auxiliary agent aligned with the main model’s reasoning trajectory, this system effectively decouples inference latency from toolset size. Experimental results confirm that VoxMind achieves significant improvements in agent performance: compared with strong baselines, the task completion rate increases from 34.88% to 74.57%, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro on spoken agent tasks while preserving general conversational quality. The source code and associated data are publicly available at https://github.com/MM-Speech/VoxMind.