D2: High-Capability Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models from Half-Duplex Backbones
Organizations: MIT CSAIL · MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Abstract
Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) support simultaneous listening and speaking, but often lag behind half-duplex spoken language models (HD-SLMs) in general capabilities. We propose Dialogue-to-Duplex (D2), a framework that converts pretrained HD-SLMs into high-capability FD-SLMs at fine temporal granularity. D2 adapts the original audio encoder to streaming through decoder-free representation distillation and learns full-duplex interaction through supervised fine-tuning. We systematically study the effects of chunk size on full-duplex interaction, general capabilities, and inference computation. We apply D2 to two distinct HD-SLM architectures, Qwen3-Omni and LLaMA-Omni 2. At a 12.5Hz update rate, Qwen3-Omni-D2 achieves 99.2% turn-taking success with 521-ms latency, 99.5% interruption success, and a state-of-the-art VoiceBench score of 70.1.
Figures & tables
| Model | Chunk duration (ms) | Quality (1–5) | Turn taking (%) | TT latency (s) | Interrupt (%) | Int. latency (s) | Pause (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Omni-D2 | 80 | 4.56 | 99.2 | 0.521 | 99.5 | 0.403 | 21.3 |
| 160 | 4.67 | 100 | 0.539 | 99.5 | 0.432 | 19.0 | |
| 320 | 4.61 | 100 | 0.710 | 99.5 | 0.571 | 25.5 | |
| 640 | 4.62 | 99.2 | 1.01 | 99.5 | 0.928 | 55.1 | |
| 1040 | 4.84 | 100 | 1.38 | 99.5 | 1.30 | 61.6 | |
| LLaMA-Omni 2-D2 | 100 | 3.33 | 100 | 0.746 | 99.5 | 0.621 | 74.5 |
| Model | Chunk duration (ms) | Alpaca Eval | Common Eval | Wild Voice | SD- QA | MMSU | OBQA | BBH | IF Eval | Adv Bench | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Omni-D2 | 80 | 4.30 | 3.47 | 3.58 | 64.5 | 64.5 | 81.5 | 64.5 | 37.2 | 91.5 | 70.1 |
| 160 | 4.33 | 3.44 | 3.63 | 68.0 | 60.0 | 71.5 | 59.0 | 29.6 | 94.0 | 67.8 | |
| 320 | 4.40 | 3.70 | 3.76 | 67.0 | 60.0 | 86.5 | 62.0 | 36.9 | 95.0 | 71.6 | |
| 640 | 4.38 | 3.96 | 3.78 | 57.0 | 63.0 | 85.5 | 60.0 | 38.0 | 95.5 | 71.3 | |
| 1040 | 4.53 | 3.67 | 3.94 | 66.5 | 63.5 | 86.0 | 60.0 | 39.4 | 98.5 | 73.0 | |
| Qwen3-Omni | HD | 4.84 | 4.52 | 4.69 | 68.5 | 73.0 | 91.0 | 87.5 | 80.7 | 99.5 | 86.8 |
| Chunk duration (ms) | Mean (ms) | p95 (ms) | RTF |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80 | 56.9 | 57.2 | 0.711 |
| 160 | 110 | 110 | 0.688 |
| 320 | 216 | 217 | 0.676 |
| 640 | 429 | 431 | 0.670 |
| 1,040 | 682 | 684 | 0.656 |
| Metric | Distill. | Supervised | No Stage I |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pause (%) | 74.5 | 61.6 | 62.0 |
| Int. TOR (%) | 99.5 | 100 | 99.0 |
| TT TOR (%) | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Quality (1–5) | 3.33 | 3.09 | 2.75 |
| Int. latency (ms) | 621 | 590 | 617 |
| TT latency (ms) | 746 | 676 | 686 |
| CE weight | Turn taking | Interruption | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAD | Control | TOR | TOR | Score |
| 0.05 | 20 | 100 | 99.0 | 3.67 |
| 1 | 20 | 95.8 | 98.0 | 3.44 |
| 0.05 | 1 | 95.8 | 98.5 | 3.55 |
| 1 | 1 | 62.2 | 90.5 | 3.45 |
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Module (both backbones) | Training | LR |
|---|---|---|
| Encoder frontend | Full | |
| Encoder attention | Full | |
| Encoder MLP/projector | LoRA, | |
| Original teacher | Frozen | – |
| Updates | 30,000 | |
| Global batch / accumulation | 4 / 1 | |
| Backbone | Module | Training | Peak LR |
| Both | Thinker attention | LoRA, | |
| Both | Encoder frontend | Full | |
| Both | Encoder attention/MLP/projector | LoRA, | |
| Both | New control and stream embeddings | Full | |
| Qwen3-Omni | Initial self-silence embedding | Full | |
| Qwen3-Omni | Talker attention/shared expert, context projections, MTP | LoRA, |
| Backbone | Chunk duration (ms) | Stage-I GPUs | Stage-I time (h) | Stage-II GPUs | Stage-II time (h) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Omni | 1 | 80 | RTX | 1.73 | RTX | 12.5 |
| 2 | 160 | L40S | 1.81 | RTX | 13.2 | |
| 4 | 320 | L40S | 1.58 | H200 | 13.0 | |
| 8 | 640 | L40S | 2.04 | RTX | 11.9 | |
| 13 | 1040 | RTX | 1.21 | RTX | 10.8 | |
| LLaMA-Omni 2 | 1 | 100 | RTX | 1.50 | RTX | 12.4 |
| Source | Unit | Count |
|---|---|---|
| LibriSpeech | Speech clip | 35,245 |
| AVQA | Audio–QA pair | 35,245 |
| InstructS2S-200K | Conversation | 149,998 |
| SODA | Conversation | 41,776 |
| Model | Chunk size (duration) | UTMOS |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Omni-D2 | 1 (80 ms) | |
| Qwen3-Omni | HD | |
| LLaMA-Omni 2-D2 | 1 (100 ms) | |
| LLaMA-Omni 2 | HD |
Speech Language Models
Speech language models connect spoken audio with large language models for understanding, transcription, translation, and real-time dialogue.
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