Beyond Two Tracks: Speaker-Anchored Full-Duplex Dialogue Recovery
Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · The University of Melbourne · Lulula
Abstract
Spoken interaction is moving from alternating turns to full-duplex conversation, where an agent listens while speaking. Learning this coordination requires natural dialogue with persistent speaker-resolved tracks, a data requirement that remains difficult to satisfy at scale. Generative recovery offers a route from ordinary recordings, but recovering two voices is not enough: their track assignments can drift as the conversation unfolds. We address this missing link with speaker-anchored routing before diffusion: a 1.84M-parameter module matches the separator's coarse streams to fixed enrollment identities and orders them before a frozen generator reconstructs the speech, without retraining the generator or altering the reconstructed audio. On 25-minute remote conversations, routing cuts wrong-track time from 43.9% to 4.1%, below the 6.2% of matched-enrollment waveform re-identification, with its largest advantage when one participant holds the floor (17.8% versus 28.6%), and raises fixed-track activity F1 from 0.46 to 0.84 while per-chunk reconstruction quality is unchanged. The same router transfers to unseen face-to-face and telephone recordings, and a margin-gated verification step brings their wrong-track time to 0.9-1.7% while embedding 20-36% of the output, where full re-identification embeds all of it. Recovered voices thus become the participant-consistent tracks that full-duplex dialogue modeling needs. Audio examples: https://elpsykongloo.github.io/beyond-two-tracks/
Figures & tables
| CANDOR: long remote dialogue | Seamless: face-to-face | SpokenWOZ: telephone | ||
| Chunk / overlap; sessions / h | 30 / 3 s; 64 / 26.67 | 120 / 10 s; 64 / 26.67 | 30 / 3 s; 360 / 25.28 | 30 / 3 s; 200 / 10.91 |
| (a) Participant assignment: WT (%) grouped by recognition cost on the decoded tracks | ||||
| No alignment | 43.86 | 18.79 | 18.66 | 13.39 |
| Released overlap cosine | 44.89 | 21.23 | 18.35 | 12.82 |
| Pre-diffusion routing | 4.08 | 1.89 | 4.17 | 2.32 |
| Enrolled waveform re-ID 100% | 6.20 | 4.72 | 2.15 | 0.57 |
| Intervention | Weights | Spk. | F1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coarse values + diffusion | adapted | .429 | .689 |
| Coarse-value adaptation | adapted | .489 | .782 |
| Permutation only | frozen | .531 | .804 |
Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems
Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems let voice agents listen and respond simultaneously, managing timing, overlap, interruptions, and conversational content.
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