@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-dual,
    title = "Dual-Reasoner: Bridging Interleaved Atomicity and Streaming Latency via Thinking-while-Talking",
    author = "Li, Yangzhuo  and
      Ji, Shengpeng  and
      Chen, Yifu  and
      Liang, Tianle  and
      Yang, Haoyu  and
      Junboli  and
      Fang, Jun  and
      Li, Lin  and
      Hong, Qingyang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.199/",
    pages = "4081--4105",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Integrating explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) into end-to-end spoken dialogue models enhances intelligence but incurs prohibitive latency. While the ``Thinking-while-Talking'' paradigm alleviates this delay, it fundamentally compromises block atomicity, severing the logical connection between interleaved thought and speech. To address this, we present Dual-Reasoner, employing a Streaming Masking Mechanism underpinned by our Dual-Think-30k dataset to guarantee uninterrupted audio streaming. Crucially, to strictly align the fragmented thinking blocks to service speech generation, we introduce the Atomic-Consistency Restoration framework. To secure comprehensive capabilities in high-difficulty reasoning, this mechanism utilizes a quadruple-constraint system to reconstruct logical atomicity, ensuring that ``think'' chunks act as a rigorous anchor for ``talk'' outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that Dual-Reasoner achieves comprehensive reasoning enhancements within ultra-low latency constraints: it elevates the VoiceBench score from 67.24 to 73.41 over the baseline, while significantly reducing the Time-to-First-Audio (TTFA) from 20.35s to 3.65s and the Real-Time Factor (RTF) from 7.04 to 1.05."
}